'A   BIT  OF  A   BRUTE" 
The  use  of  bayonet  practice  was  moral ;  by  it  a  blazing,  vicious 
hatred  was  worked  up  in  the  common  soldier. 


"THE   NEXT   WAR" 

AN  APPEAL  TO  COMMON  SENSE 

BY 
WILL  IRWIN 

AUTHOR    OF    "men,    WOMEN    AND    WAR," 
"a  reporter  in   ARMAGEDDON,"  ETC. 


NEW  YORK 

E.  P.  BUTTON  ^  COMPANY 

681  FIFTH  AVENUE 


Copyright,  1921, 
BY  E.  P.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 


All  Rights  Reserved 


First   printing April,  1921 

Second  "       April.  1921 

Third  "       May,  1921 

Fourth  "       May,  1921 

Fifth  "       June,  1921 

Sixth  "       June,  1921 

Seventh  "       June,  1921 

Eighth  "      June.  1921 


Prln^eA  tn  the  TTnltad  States  of  Amartoa 


CONTENTS 

CBAPTEB  PAGE 

I.  War  and  Prophecy i 

11.  The  Breeding  of  Calamity 5 

III.  Second   Ypres 23 

IV.  The  New  Warfare 35 

V.  Tactics  of  the  Next  War 44 

VI.  War  and  the  Race 67 

VII.  The  Cost  in  Money .  79 

VIII.  Economics  and  the  Next  War •.     .  103 

IX.  "The  Tonic  of  Nations" 112 

X.  The  Discipline  of  Peace 119 

XI.  "Defensive  Preparation" 128 

XII.  The  Dramatic  Moment ■.     .     .     .  137 

XIII.  Proposed  Ways  to  Peace 142 

XIV.  The  Tempter >: 158 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

"A  Bit  of  a  Brute" Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Obsolete  Armament i6 

Artillery  Fire  in   1815 40 

Artillery    Fire   in    1915 4° 

The  Increasing  Size  of  Bombs 42 

A   Land   Dreadnought 56 

Proposed  Aircraft  Carrier 5^ 

A  Half  Ton   Shell 95 

Campus  of  the  University  of  Michigan 110 


"THE  NEXT  WAR" 


THE  NEXT  WAR 

CHAPTER  I 

WAR  AND   PROPHECY 

Mankind,  it  has  been  said,  lives  by  happy  com- 
binations of  words,  thinks  by  phrases.  With  phrases, 
no  less  than  with  engines  of  destruction,  the  world 
fought  the  Great  War  of  19 14-18 — "The  War  for 
Democracy"  on  the  AUied  side,  "The  Place  in  the 
Sun"  and  "Spreading  our  Kultur"  on  the  German. 
Volumes  of  political  essays  and  bales  of  editorials 
have  less  influence  among  the  American  people  at 
present  than  that  popular  expression,  "A  hundred 
per  cent  American." 

In  the  two  years  since  the  Armistice,  a  new  phrase 
has  entered  the  discussion  of  military  affairs  not  only 
in  America  but  in  all  the  European  countries — 
"the  next  war."  It  appears  many  times  daily  in 
the  reactionary  press  of  Berlin,  Vienna,  Budapest, 
Paris.  It  sprinkles  the  reports  in  the  staff  colleges 
of  the  Continent,  of  England,  of  the  United  States. 
It  has  furnished  already  the  theme  for  books  in  all 
European  languages.    "The  First  World  War,"  the 


2  THE  NEXT  WAR 

title  of  a  book  lately  published  by  Colonel  Reping- 
ton,  is  only  a  variant  on  this  phrase. 

Prophecy  concerning  the  trend  of  political  affairs 
is  not  only  perilous  but  well-nigh  impossible.  In  all 
the  prophecy  of  the  late  war,  who  foretold  the  future 
course  of  Russia?  There  were  whisperings,  in- 
deed in  the  Allied  countries,  there  were  loud  fore- 
casts in  Germany,  that  Russia  might  withdraw  from 
the  Entente;  but  who  prophesied  the  curious  circum- 
stances of  her  withdrawal  and  the  still  more  curious 
results  to  which  it  led?  Ten  European  statesmen 
believed  that  Holland,  Switzerland  or  even  Spain 
might  enter  the  great  war  to  one  who  counted  on 
the  United  States.  And  who,  before  19 17,  prophe- 
sied in  what  manner  we  would  be  the  deciding  factor 
or  even  hinted  at  our  curious  influence  on  the  peace? 
Who  looked  forward  and  foresaw  the  American  flag 
flying  over  the  mighty  fortress  of  Ehrenbreitstein 
at  Coblenz? 

Such  affairs  as  these  belong  to  the  political  side 
of  war,  partake  of  its  uncertainty.  It  would  be 
foolish,  therefore,  for  even  the  wisest  ^nd  best-in- 
formed statesman,  and  still  less  for  a  journalist,  to 
prophesy  what  nations  or  combinations  of  nations 
might  oppose  forces  in  that  "next  war."  The  com- 
plexity of  the  question,  involving  as  it  does  eco- 
nomics, internal  politics,  religion,  sudden  outbreaks 
of  mob-mind,  shifts  of  population,  the  rise  of  lead- 
ers as  yet  unknown,  renders  forecast  impossible. 
Beside  such  a  game,  chess  is  as  simple  as  jackstraws. 


WAR  AND  PROPHECY  3 

But  forecasting  the  methods,  strategies  and  effects 
of  future  wars  is  more  like  a  purely  mathematical 
problem,  and  infinitely  easier.  Such  forecasts  have 
been  made  in  the  past;  and  the  best-informed  and 
more  Intelligent  of  them  have  been  vindicated  by  the 
course  of  events.  Before  the  Russo-Japanese  war, 
military  critics  who  combined  sound  information 
with  sound  imagination  said  that  in  the  next  war 
between  thoroughly  prepared  armies,  the  frontal 
lines  would  become  deadlocked  in  trenches,  and  that 
battle  could  then  be  won  only  by  a  sudden  and  well- 
conceived  surprise  on  the  flank.  That  is  exactly 
the  history  of  the  Russo-Japanese  war;  Nogl's  great 
flanking  movement  won  the  battle  of  Mukden  after 
the  main  forces  had  undergone  some  weeks  of  stale- 
mate in  the  front  trenches.  Had  the  Russians  pos- 
sessed a  single  scout  aeroplane,  Nogl's  success  would 
have  been  impossible.  The  aeroplane  appeared  a 
few  years  later,  proved  itself  not  a  toy  but  a  prac- 
tical machine.  Then  the  military  critics,  of  the  class 
before  mentioned  made  a  new  forecast.  A  war 
between  densely-populated  and  thoroughly  armed 
peoples  such  as  those  of  Europe,  they  said,  might  be 
decided  by  an  overwhelming  Initial  thrust.  Falling 
that,  it  must  settle  down  to  a  long  deadlock  in 
trenches,  a  war"  of  attrition  with  unprecedented 
losses,  to  be  decided  only  when  one  side  or  the  other 
crumpled  up  through  exhaustion  of  economic  re- 
sources and  of  morale.  That  view  was  expressed 
for  the  United  States  in  Frederick  Palmer's  novel, 


4  THE  NEXT  WAR 

"The  Last  Shot."  And  these  forecasts  of  the  mili- 
tary critics  might  stand  now  as  histories  of  the  great 
war. 

So  it  is  possible  to  speak  with  some  authority  con- 
cerning the  character  of  that  "next  war,"  especially 
since  so  many  able  Europeans  have  already  recorded 
and  analyzed  the  experiences  and  lessons  of  "the  first 
world  war."  Though  we  cannot  do  more  than  guess 
at  the  participants,  we  can  foresee  the  methods  of 
that  struggle  and  its  direct  and  indirect  results  on 
the  lives  and  property,  the  souls  and  bodies,  of  the 
nations  who  find  themselves  involved. 

It  is  difficult,  however,  rightly  to  see  the  future 
without  at  least  a  glance  at  the  past.  It  is  doubly 
diflicult  in  this  discussion,  because  during  the  war  of 
1 9 14-18  certain  forces  hitherto  smouldering  burst 
into  blaze.  Not  only  did  the  character  of  warfare 
change,  but  its  whole  relation  to  peoples  and  to 
human  life.  From  now  on,  we  must  consider  war  in 
an  entirely  new  light.  An  understanding  of  the  dif- 
ference between  old  wars  and  "the  next  war"  is 
essential  to  an  understanding  of  the  present  struggle 
between  militarism  and  reasonable  pacifism,  between 
the  aristocratic  ideal  of  society  and  the  democratic, 
between  those  who  believe  in  that  next  war  and  those 
who  are  groping  toward  a  state  of  society  which  will 
abolish  war. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   BREEDING   OF   CALAMITY 

Man  alone,  among  the  higher  animals,  seems 
characteristically  to  fight  his  own  kind  to  the  death. 
Doubtless  before  there  was  law  or  morals  the  primi- 
tive savage  often  got  the  woman,  the  ox  or  the  stone 
knife  which  he  wanted  simply  by  killing  the  pos- 
sessor. With  the  organization  of  society,  groups 
and  tribes  began  to  do  the  same  thing  collectively 
as  a  means  of  acquiring  live-stock,  wives,  slaves  or 
territory;  and  we  had  war.  In  primitive  society,  if 
we  may  judge  from  our  study  of  existing  savages, 
wars  were  often  comparatively  bloodless  affairs,  set- 
tled by  a  contest  between  two  champions  or  by  a 
few  wounds.  Whole  groups  and  tribes  may  have 
lived  on  the  pacifist  theory,  as  do  today  certain 
African  nations  which  will  not  keep  cattle  because 
cattle  bring  on  raids  and  peace  is  with  them  pref- 
erable to  property. 

When  the  curtain  lifts  on  recorded  history,  tribes 
were  collecting  into  nations,  and  kingship  was  firmly- 
fixed  in  human  affairs.  By  now,  war  also  was  a 
permanent  human  institution;  every  throne  was 
propped  up  by  an  army.    The  relation  of  warfare  to 

5 


6  THE  NEXT  WAR 

this  early  progress  has  been  traced  by  H,  G.  Wells 
In  his  "Outline  of  History."  A  people  settled  down, 
developed  agriculture,  town  life,  a  literature,  the 
mechanical  arts,  the  beginnings  of  scientific  knowl- 
edge ;  accumulated  wealth  and  desirable  luxuries.  In 
this  process,  they  became  to  the  barbarian  point  of 
view  "effeminate,"  and  easy  prey  for  conquest. 

Warfare,  then  and  for  centuries  afterwards,  was 
mostly  a  matter  of  individual  fighting.  That  side 
was  the  victor  which  had  the  greater  average  of  men 
strong  and  skilled  with  the  sword  or  lance,  accurate 
with  the  bow.  The  settled  peoples,  busy  with  the 
arts  of  peace,  had  not  the  time  for  that  Hfe-long,  in- 
tensive, athletic  training  which  made  good  warriors. 
The  barbarians,  therefore,  beat  them  in  battle,  took 
their  wealth,  settled  down  among  them,  learned  their 
arts.  They  in  turn  became  weakened  for  warfare, 
and  another  wave  of  barbarians  repeated  the  pro- 
cess. Though  there  were  exceptions,  such  as  the 
long  hold  of  the  civilized  Roman  Empire,  this  was 
the  general  rhythm  of  ancient  wars;  even  of  me- 
diaeval wars. 

Viewed  in  this  light,  we  have  reason  for  arguing 
that  warfare  was  a  positive  if  costly  benefit.     Thr^ 
world  in  general  was  without  means  of  commun: 
cation;  the  written  word  which  carried  knowledg 
was  unavailable  to  whole  peoples,  to  all  but  a  fe\ 
even  among  the  most  favored  peoples.     Travel  be- 
yond one's  national  boundaries  was  almost  unknown; 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY        7 

the  barbarians  had  an  invariable  custom  of  killing 
strangers.  Possibly  by  no  other  means  than  war- 
fare could  the  rudiments  of  civilization  have  reached 
the  outer  fringe.  When  the  wild  Persians  over- 
whelmed them,  the  peoples  of  the  Mesopotamian 
Basin  had  a  written  language,  an  understanding  of 
primitive  mechanics,  a  system  of  star-measurement. 
Left  alone,  they  might  have  gone  on  to  advanced 
mechanics  such  as  the  steam  engine,  to  the  truth 
about  sidereal  space  and  the  world  in  space.  The 
Persians  blew  out  all  that  bright  promise;  yet  before 
they  themselves  were  conquered,  they  had  acquired 
what  their  captives  had  learned.  So  it  went,  the 
world  over,  except  in  those  three  or  four  rather 
abnormal  centuries  during  which  Rome  held  sway 
over  the  world;  and  not  even  Rome  was  wholly  an 
exception.  She  conquered  Greece;  but  intellectually 
she  became  so  absorbed  by  the  Hellenic  people  that 
every  Roman  gentleman  must  speak  perfect  Greek 
or  he  was  no  gentleman.  The  Goths  came  into 
Southern  Europe  unlettered  barbarians;  in  a  few 
centuries,  they  had  In  Ravenna  the  most  advanced 
civilization  of  their  time;  and  they  learned  it  all 
\  from  the  conquered.  The  Northmen  got  their  let- 
ters, their  mathematics,  their  mechanics  from  subject 
""peoples.  The  German  Junkers  professed  that  they 
waged  the  late  war  to  spread  their  culture  by  con- 
quering; the  ancient  peoples  spread  their  culture 
by  being  conquered.     He  would  be  indeed  a  preju- 


8  THE  NEXT  WAR 

diced  pacifist  who  ignored  this  aspect  of  old  war,  or 
denied  the  possibility  that  in  such  times  war  was 
beneficial. 

In  those  days  of  primitive  nations  warfare  had 
no  rules,  or  very  few,  of  mercy  or  decency.  The 
conquering  king  and  his  men,  undeterred  by  scruples, 
did  as  they  pleased  with  the  conquered.  If  it 
served  their  whim  or  purpose,  they  slaughtered  a 
surrendered  army,  even  the  women  and  children,  of 
a  whole  surrendered  tribe.  The  kingly  inscriptions 
of  Egypt  and  Assyria  boast  of  such  deeds  as  glories 
of  the  crown.  When  the  tribe  was  spared,  it  was  often 
merely  that  it  might  work  to  pay  the  victor  tribute, 
or  to  furnish  him  with  slaves.  If  there  were  pro- 
testing voices  they  have  left  no  record.  But  as 
early  as  the  great  days  of  Greece,  we  find  a  little 
faint  criticism  both  of  war  itself  and  its  methods. 
The  thing,  certain  men  thought,  was  an  evil,  a 
calamity.  It  could  not  be  stopped,  probably;  but 
it  was  an  evil  nevertheless.  There  did  arise,  how- 
ever, a  dim  code — rudimentary  morals  of  war.  It 
was  no  longer  quite  ethical  to  kill  women  and  chil- 
dren, to  slaughter  your  prisoners.  It  was  often 
done;  but  it  required  explanation  and  apology. 
When,  some  half-century  before  Christ,  Julius 
C£esar  put  to  death  the  Usepetes  and  Tenectri,  he 
was  denounced  in  the  Roman  senate,  and  Cato  even 
proposed  that  he  be  turned  over  to  the  Germans. 

Christianity,  when  it  came  at  last  powerfully  into 
human  affairs,   carried  forward  this  moral  move- 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY        g 

ment.  A  divine  institution  applied  by  imperfect 
men,  it  did  not  strike  at  the  roots  of  war;  nor  in- 
deed did  it  seem  dearly  to  recognize  them.  It  es- 
tablished, however,  the  principle  that  an  unjust  war 
was  wicked;  and  it  did  strive  to  ameliorate  the  un- 
necessary horrors  and  to  fix  the  tradition  of  chival- 
rous warfare.  The  Truce  of  God,  by  which  it  be- 
came wicked  to  fight  on  certain  days  of  the  week, 
was  an  attempt  in  this  direction. 

The  movement  collapsed  in  the  great  religious  or 
half-religious  wars  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and 
for  a  reason  quite  logical  and  understandable.  Both 
sides  were  fighting  heresy,  a  sin  and  crime — they 
thought — which  did  not  merely  injure  men  in  this 
life  as  do  most  ordinary  crimes,  but  which  con- 
demned their  souls  to  an  eternity  of  misery.  No 
punishment  was  too  severe  for  heresy.  Hence  such 
massacres  as  those  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War  in 
Germany,  and  the  sack  of  Antwerp  in  the  Low  Coun- 
tries. 

When  mankind  came  out  of  this  madness,  the  drift 
toward  chivalrous  warfare  was  resumed.  The  code, 
by  the  twentieth  century,  had  become  definite;  it 
was  a  chapter  in  every  general  military  text  book,  a 
course  in  the  education  of  every  professional  sol- 
dier; finally  it  was  sanctioned  almost  as  international 
law  by  the  Hague  Peace  Conference.  In  principle, 
war  must  rest  as  easily  as  possible  on  non-combat- 
ants such  as  women  and  children;  nor  might  even 
an  armed  enemy  be  killed  unnecessarily.     In  detail, 


lo  THE  NEXT  WAR 

it  was  agreed  that  a  city  might  not  be  besieged  until 
the  non-combatants  had  been  given  time  to  get  away 
from  the  ensuing  bombardment  and  starvation,  that 
the  victors  holding  occupied  territory  must  be  re- 
sponsible for  the  lives  of  the  inhabitants,  that  prison- 
ers of  wars  must  not  only  be  spared  but  adequately 
fed  and  housed,  that  surgeons,  nurses  and  stretcher- 
bearers  must  have  every  reasonable  opportunity  to 
rescue  and  succor  the  wounded;  finally  that  certain 
"barbarous"  methods  of  killing,  such  as  explosive 
bullets  and  poison  gases,  might  not  be  used.  And 
the  military  clan  of  all  nations  generally  accepted 
this  code  as  the  law  and  the  gospel;  they  had  been 
bred  in  the  idea  of  chivalry,  and  had  developed  a 
beautiful  and  strict  conception  of  professional  ethics 
which  implied  truth  and  honor  toward  their  own, 
and  a  sense  of  mercy  toward  their  enemies.  With 
such  an  attitude  toward  war,  the  nations  entered  the 
unprecedented  struggle  of  19 14-18. 

In  the  meantime,  another  current  had  been  run- 
ning among  the  European  peoples;  it  i-s  necessary  to 
understand  that  in  order  to  understand  the  present 
situation.  In  the  period  since  the  religious  wars,  in 
general  during  a  long  pericnl  before  that,  warfare 
had  settled  into  the  hands  of  professional  armies, 
officered  by  the  aristocracy,  recruited  in  general  from 
the  dregs  of  the  population,  padded  with  mercenary 
soldiers  of  fortune.  These  forces  were  compara- 
tively small,  even  in  time  of  war. 

In   1704,  Marlborough  won  the  battle  of  Blen- 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY       1 1 

heim  and  imposed  his  will  on  the  Continent  of 
Europe  with  50,000  mixed  British,  Dutch  and  Aus- 
trian troops.  France  was  considered,  in  this  p)€riod, 
the  great  military  power  of  the  world.  Just  before 
the  Revolution  of  1789  her  armies  had  a  theoretical 
war  strength  of  210,000,  or  about  one  in  100  of 
the  population.  Nor  was  the  economic  burden  of 
warfare  very  heavy.  The  weapons  were  compara- 
tively few  and  primitive — flint  lock  muskets  for  the 
infantry,  sabres  and  lances  for  the  cavalry,  plain 
smooth-bore  cannon  for  the  artillery.  Speaking 
generally,  ammunition  consisted  of  four  standard 
commodities — black  powder,  round  lead  bullets, 
flints,  and  solid  cannon  balls.  The  factories  which 
supplied  enough  of  this  ammunition  for  the  limited 
armies  of  the  day  represented  only  a  very  small  part 
of  the  nation's  productive  forces.  And,  except  in 
regions  swept  by  the  armies,  the  industries  of  the 
nations  went  on  in  war  much  as  in  peace.  Even  an 
unsuccessful  war  laid  on  the  people  only  a  compara- 
tively light  burden  of  taxation.  The  losses  in  men 
were  not  so  great  but  that  the  general  increase  in 
races  almost  instantly  filled  the  gap.  At  Blenheim, 
before  mentioned,  Marlborough  lost  less  than  five 
thousand  men  both  killed  and  wounded,  the  defeated 
French  and  their  Bavarian  allies  only  eleven 
thousand. 

Then  came  the  French  Revolution.  The  new, 
fanatical  French  Republic,  opposed  by  an  alliance 
of  all  the  kings  of  Europe,  its  frontier  invaded,  its 


12  THE  NEXT  WAR 

nobility  joined  with  the  enemy,  faced  the  alternative 
of  a  struggle  with  every  resource  it  had  or  ex- 
tinction and  the  gallows.  The  principle  of  conscrip- 
tion was  decreed  for  the  first  time  by  a  great  na- 
tion. Every  man  capable  of  bearing  arms  must  serve 
or  hold  himself  ready  to  serve.  And  national  in- 
dustries also  were  mobilized,  even  if  crudely. 
Theoretically,  at  least,  all  the  Iron-workers  of  France 
went  to  work  on  guns,  cannon,  pikes  and  ammuni- 
tion. In  the  very  streets  of  Paris  stood  the  forges, 
hammering  out  bayonets. 

There  followed  the  twenty  years  of  the  Na- 
poleonic wars,  wherein  conscription  was  applied  in 
fact  if  not  always  in  name.  From  that  time,  through 
fifty  years  of  comparative  peace,  the  thing  grew  as 
a  principle  of  statecraft.  It  did  not  become  set- 
tled and  universal,  however,  until  after  the  Franco- 
Prussian  War  of  1870.  Prussia,  ambitious  leader  of 
the  German  states,  herself  led  by  men  with  ruthless 
genius,  had  applied  the  principle  of  conscription,  had 
planned  and  studied  the  possibilities  of  modern  war- 
fare as  they  had  never  been  studied  before.  The 
German  army  was  ready  "to  the  last  buckle"  when 
it  burst  on  France,  swept  up  the  brave  but  ill-organ- 
ized army  of  MacMahon,  took  Metz  and  Paris,  and 
in  six  months  brought  about  a  peace  which  tore  from 
France  two  provinces,  nearly  her  whole  supply  of 
iron  ore,  a  discriminating  tariff  agreement,  and  the 
unprecedented  indemnity  of  a  billion  dollars.  Ger- 
many had  shown  the  way  to  the  militarists. 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY       13 

Now  we  must  go  back  again  and  trace  for  a 
moment  a  third  current,  rurming  into  that  cesspool 
which  overflowed  in  19 14. 

The  era  of  kingship,  as  a  focus  for  human  loyalty, 
had  passed  into  the  era  of  Powers.  And  these 
Powers  grew  as  predatory  as  the  Roman  Empire, 
though  less  frankly  and  obviously  so.  The  age  of 
machinery,  of  intensive  manufacture,  had  arrived. 
Europe  produced  only  a  part  of  the  raw  materials 
which  she  needed  for  her  furnaces,  her  forges  or 
her  looms.  That  country  would  prosper  best,  it 
was  felt,  which  held  the  tightest  grip  on  the  sources 
of  raw  material.  Every  European  nation  was  turn- 
ing out  more  manufactured  goods  than  it  could  use 
at  home;  all  needed  foreign  trade;  and  "trade  fol- 
lows the  flag."  Finally,  as  national  wealth  was 
multiplied  through  the  fruitful  processes  of  ma- 
chinery, Europe  began  to  pile  up  surplus  capital. 
Investment  in  new,  undeveloped  lands  was  much 
more  profitable  to  capital  than  domestic  investment 
under  tight  conditions. 

Out  beyond  the  fringes  of  European  civiliza- 
tion lay  barbaric  and  semi-civilized  peoples  owning 
raw  materials,  ready  to  buy  European  manufactured 
goods,  promising  still  other  benefits  to  the  nation 
which  could  possess  them  either  as  conquerors  or 
"protectors."  It  was  easy  for  a  European  states- 
man, who  wanted  a  fruitful  barbarian  country,  to 
find  the  pretext.  A  native  king,  we  will  say,  was  en- 
couraged to  get  hopelessly  into  debt  with  a  Euro- 


14  THE  NEXT  WAR 

pean  government  or  banking  firm.  An  "incident" 
occurred.  There  were  Europeans  who  made  a  trade 
of  bringing  on  such  incidents.  National  honor  was 
offended;  also,  there  was  the  debt.  The  army  of 
the  European  power  involved — sometimes  blood- 
lessly,  sometimes  after  a  brief  campaign — assumed 
the  responsibilities  of  the  native  king.  The  debt 
was  paid  in  time;  but  the  European  control  re- 
mained. I  describe  here,  and  only  as  an  example, 
one  method  among  many. 

When  any  given  power  so  extended  its  "influence," 
it  tried  to  rr^ke  that  influence  exclusive.  It  must 
have  all  the  i^lw  materials  and  all  the  markets 
which  it  cared  to  take.  It  must  have  all  the  rights 
to  invest  capital.  When  the  European  nation,  for 
fear  of  its  rivals,  could  not  take  over  any  unde- 
velopea  nation  outright,  it  tried  to  bring  it  at  least 
within  its  "sphere  of  influence" — z  kind  of  half- 
control  leading  in  time  to  full  conquest.  The  critics 
of  this  system  call  it  "financial  imperialism."  For 
European  diplomacy,  backed  by  enormous  armies^ 
by  great  national  banking  houses,  by  munitions  man-, 
ufacturers,  had  become  almost  frankly  commercial. 

Diplomacy  kept  the  long  peace  which  this  pohcy 
always  endangered  by  a  system  borrowed  from  the 
eighteenth  century  and  much  improved  in  the  nine- 
teenth. "The  Balance  of  Power"  it  used  to  be 
called;  now  it  was  termed  "the  Concert  of  the 
Powers."  Nations,  led  by  the  great  powers,  allied 
themselves  in  such  manner  as  to  keep  the  opposing 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY       15 

sets  of  interests  at  about  equal  strength.  If  you 
expect  to  make  a  successful  aggressive  war,  you  must 
have  a  superiority  of  forces.  Two  nations  about 
even  in  military  resources  are  not  likely  to  fight. 
The  risk  of  failure  is  too  great.  And  so  with  two 
alliances.  But  all  this  time,  another  current  was 
running  strongly  among  European  nations.  Each 
alliance  was  struggling  to  build  up  stronger  poten- 
tial power  than  the  other.  This  helped  when,  as 
happened  every  four  or  five  years,  there  rose  a 
visible  conflict  of  interests.  The  stronger  you  were 
in  a  military  way,  the  stronger  would  be  the  situa- 
tion of  your  diplomats.  Every  y  .r,  the  European 
"race  of  armaments"  grew  more  intense. 

Expressed  in  less  abstract  terms,  this  was  the 
general  state  of  Europe  during  the  forty  or  fifty 
years  which  followed  the  Franco-Prussiai.  ^var: 

On  the  Continent,  military  conscription'  had  be- 
come universal.  If  Great  Britain  did  not  follow,  it 
was  because  she,  an  island  kingdom,  was  checking 
armies  with  an  unprecedented  navy.  On  the  Conti- 
nent, every  young  man  must  serve  his  two  or  three 
years  with  the  colors,  learning  to  be  a  modern  sol- 
dier. Retired  to  the  Reserve,  he  must  at  intervals 
drop  his  work  and  drill  again,  in  order  "to  keep 
his  sword  bright."  The  financial  burden  of  arming 
this  soldier  grew  even  greater.  As  I  shall  presently 
show,  weapons  of  warfare  never  until  recently  im- 
proved so  fast  as  industrial  tools;  but  they  did  im- 
prove almost  too  rapidly   for  the  finances  of  the 


i6  THE  NEXT  WAR 

nations.  The  Germans  decided  that  a  repeating 
rifle  could  be  used  with  advantage  in  infantry  tac- 
tics; the  French  must  scrap  from  five  to  ten  million 
single-shot  rifles  and  replace  them  by  repeaters. 
When  the  British  proved  that  a  battleship  of  unpre- 
cedented size  entirely  armed  with  big  guns  could 
thrash  any  small  battleship  armed  with  guns  of 
mixed  calibres,  all  existing  battleships  were  headed 
toward  the  junk-yard,  and  the  rival  nations  must 
build  dreadnoughts.  When  France  worked  out  a  field- 
gun  unprecedented  for  accuracy  and  rapidity  of  fire, 
thousands  of  German  field-guns  must  go  to  the  melt- 
ing-pot or  to  museums,  to  be  replaced  by  imitations 
of  the  French  "soixante-quinze."  And  the  expense 
of  these  improvements  increased  almost  in  arith- 
metical ratio.  A  repeating  rifle,  with  its  compli- 
cated mechanism,  cost  much  more  than  a  smooth 
bore.  "First-line"  ships  for  modern  navies  cost  in 
the  seventies  one  or  two  million  dollars;  a  crack 
dreadnought  costs  now  a  matter  of  forty  or  fifty 
million  dollars.  The  burden  of  taxation  weighed 
heavier  and  ever  heavier  on  the  common  man  and 
woman  of  Europe.  There  were  signs  just  before  the 
Great  War  that  the  race  of  armament  was  slowing 
^up.  Nations  seemed  to  hesitate  about  adopting 
obvious  but  costly  improvements.  The  true  cause 
back  of  this,  doubtless,  was  that  taxation  was  reach- 
ing the  "point  of  saturation" — for  peace  times  at 
least.  Agitation  against  military  service  began  to 
make  itself  heard.    It  took  two  years  from  the  work- 


OBSOLETE    ARMAMENT 

The  U.  S.  S.  Indiana,  before  and  after  it  became  a  target  for 
the   14-inch   rifles   of  the   superdreadnought  Oklahoma. 

The  Indiana  cost  $5,800,000  when  built.  The  latest  super- 
dreadnoughts  cost  at  least  $40,000,000. 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY       17 

ing  life  of  every  able-bodied  young  man;  and  its 
obvious  end  was  not  creation  of  wealth,  but 
destruction. 

But  the  nations  in  general  could  not  let  go,  even 
had  their  statesmen  desired  to  renounce  "Financial 
Imperialism"  and  its  buttress  of  great  standing 
armies.  If  for  no  other  reason,  because  Germany 
sat  in  the  centre  of  Europe,  unconverted  to  any 
theories  which  involved  military  disarmament;  and 
England  sat  behind  her  sea  walls,  afraid  of  any 
theories  which  involved  naval  disarmament.  But 
Germany  was  setting  the  pace.  She  had  learned 
the  "lesson"  of  the  Franco-Prussian  war — a  "nation 
in  arms,"  an  army  methodically,  scientifically  pre- 
pared from  its  boots  to  its  plan  of  campaign,  eter- 
nally ready  for  that  sudden  stroke  which  catches  the 
enemy  unprepared.  Scientific  military  preparation- 
had  laid  the  foundations  for  the  prosperity  and 
greatness  of  modern  Germany.  More  scientific  prepa- 
ration— more  prosperity  and  greatness !  That  Ger- 
man genius  for  organization,  scarcely  suspected  be- 
fore 1870,  sprang  into  full  blaze.  And  the  army 
was  organized  into  every  German  institution.  The 
state  schools  educated  the  children  to  make  them  not 
only  good  citizens  and  efficient  workers,  but  also 
good  soldiers.  With  a  skill  and  thoroughness  which 
was  the  marvel  of  its  time,  Germany  wove  the  army 
into  the  fabric  of  civilian  life.  Her  state  railways 
were  laid  down  not  only  for  commercial  needs  but 
also  with  a  view  to  moving  great  bodies  of  troops 


i8  THE  NEXT  WAR 

toward  any  critical  point  on  the  frontiers.  Her  great 
steel  works,  making  and  exporting  the  tools  and 
machinery  of  civilian  life,  could  be  changed  over  with 
a  minimum  of  trouble  into  factories  for  munitions 
of  war.  She  specialized,  indeed,  on  munition  making 
— furnished  the  rifles  and  cannon  for  the  little  wars 
of  the  far  countries. 

The  "psychological  preparation"  imposed  by  the 
rulers  of  Germany  was  just  as  thorough.  A  state- 
controlled  pulpit,  a  state-controlled  press,  state-con- 
trolled teachers  and  university  professors,  ham- 
mered or  insinuated  into  the  German  people  exag- 
gerated, conceited  patriotism  and  the  thought  of» 
war — the  "Religion  of  Valor."  With  the  national 
talent  for  intellectual  speculation,  the  Germans  of 
the  governing  class  worked  out  a  philosophy  which 
sounds  quaint  to  practical-minded  Americans,  but 
upon  which  men  lived  and  died.  The  state  was  a 
thing  with  a  soul.  It  was  the  duty  of  the  subject, 
his  highest  end,  to  advance  the  glory  and  interest  of 
the  state,  no  matter  if  that  glory  made  every 
subject  poorer  and  less  happy.  We,  of  course,  look 
upon  the  state  as  a  means  of  getting  together  and 
promoting  the  happiness  and  security  of  its  mem- 
bers. If  it  does  not  generally  have  that  result,  it  is 
nothing.  When  it  comes  to  promoting  the  interests 
of  the  state — this  philosophy  held — all  ordinary 
rules  of  morals  are  off.  Acts  like  theft,  murder,  un- 
chastity,  cruelty,  calling  for  severe  punishment  when 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY       19 

performed  against  other  citizens  of  the  state,  became 
holy  when  performed  for  the  state. 

War  was  the  highest  manifestation  of  the  state, 
the  supreme  act  which  gave  it  glory,  the  opportunity 
for  the  subject  to  prove  his  devotion.  War  was  good 
in  itself.  It  was,  first  of  all,  natural.  All  biological 
life  was  a  struggle.  The  weak  went  down,  the 
strong  survived;  by  this  process  the  species  evolved 
and  improved.  So,  the  weaker  races  go  down  be- 
fore the  stronger,  for  the  improvement  of  the  human 
breed*.  Of  course,  your  own  race  was  the  strongest, 
the  most  worthy  of  survival.  Races  grew  soft  in 
peace,  strong  in  war.  The  talk  about  doing  away 
with  warfare  was  "immoral,  unnatural,  degrading." 

Such,  briefly,  were  the  ideas  upon  which  Germany 
was  being  fed.  We  all  know  that,  I  suppose.  Most 
of  us  have  heard  of  Bernhardi  and  his  book  "Ger- 
many and  the  Next  War" — the  extreme  expression 
of  this  view.  What  we  do  not  perhaps  appreciate 
Is  that  such  opinions  were  not  peculiar  to  Germany. 
In  the  Great  War,  in  the  settlement  after  the  Great 
War,  Europe  was  divided  not  only  by  a  horizontal 

*I  shall  treat  later  on  of  other  articles  of  this  faith  but  this 
one  might  as  well  be  nailed  here  and  now.  Admitting  what  is 
popularly  called  the  Darwinian  theory  of  the  origin  of  species 
through  survival  of  the  fittest,  evolutionists  still  doubt  whether  man 
did  not  free  himself  from  the  law  of  evolution  at  the  moment  when 
he  fashioned  the  first  tool,  built  the  first  fire.  From  that  time,  he 
became  not  the  creature  of  his  environment,  but  its  master.  But 
even  if  the  man-species  still  lives,  grows  and  improves  by  the 
law  of  evolution,  the  struggle  for  existence  is,  in  the  natural,  ani- 
mal state,  between  individual  and  individual,  not  between  tribe 
and  tribe,  horde  and  horde.  This  is  like  many  other  militarist 
arguments;  it  is  neither  true  nor  scientific;  it  only  seems  so. 


20  THE  NEXT  WAR 

line  between  Entente  Allies  and  Germanic  Allies,  but 
by  a  vertical  line  between  the  aristocratic  element 
and  the  democratic  element.  The  set  of  ideas  which 
I  have  quoted  above  were  distinctly  aristocratic  in 
their  aims  and  origins;  by  an  aristocracy  in  secure 
control  they  were  disseminated.  But  the  other 
European  aristocracies  held  exactly  the  same  view — 
not  so  logically  worked  out  perhaps,  not  so  frankly 
expressed,  but  the  same  at  the  bottom.  Lord 
Roberts,  the  venerable  and  respected  British  gen- 
eral, issued  a  kind  of  manifesto  at  the  beginning  of 
the  war.  Less  brutal  and  feverish  in  expression,  it  is 
in  thought  the  same  thing  as  the  mouthings  of  the 
German  Junkers.  "War  is  necessary  for  the  souls  of 
people,"  he  said  in  effect;  "it  is  the  tonic  of  races." 
You  heard  the  same  sentiments  from  the  French  Gen- 
eral Staff.  The  difference  was  only  this:  whereas  in 
the  Entente  countries  the  democratic  idea  kept  a 
balance  with  the  aristocratic  as  in  Great  Britain  and 
Italy,  or  maintained  the  ascendence  as  in  France, 
the  aristocratic  element  held  in  Germany  the  con- 
trol over  government,  over  most  material  activities, 
over  most  sources  of  public  opinion.  Germany,  said 
the  aristocrats  of  the  neutral  European  nations,  had 
made  aristocracy  scientific,  brought  it  up  to  date, 
showed  how  it  could  be  fastened  on  to  a  modern 
state.  That  was  why  these  neutral  aristocracies 
were  one  and  all  pro-German. 

There  were  German  dissenters,  of  course.    There 
were  in  fact  many  of  them,  as  the  Social  Democratic 


THE  BREEDING  OF  CALAMITY      21 

vote  showed  In  19 13,  the  Revolution  in  19 18.  But 
their  dissent  was  as  yet  ineffective.  Probably  the 
majority  of  Germans  believed  in  this  Religion  of 
Valor  which  they  had  learned  with  their  Christian 
prayers.  Certainly  the  majority  believed  that  the 
intensive,  perpetual  preparation  for  instant  war  was 
a  necessity  to  a  nation  "ringed  with  enemies."  The 
preparation  went  on,  ever  and  ever  more  burden- 
some and  complex.  So  did  the  propaganda,  the 
"mental  preparation."  By  19 14,  the  Germans  pub- 
lished and  read  more  books  on  war  than  all  the  other 
nations  of  the  world  put  together.  "The  man  who 
builds  the  ship  will  want  to  sail  it,"  say  the  nautical 
experts.  And  the  man  who  forges  the  sword  will 
want  to  wield  it.  By  19 14,  the  mine  was  laid  and 
ready.  With  their  "financial  imperialism,"  their 
"concert  of  the  powers,"  their  race  for  dominating 
armament,  all  the  European  nations  were  responsi- 
ble for  that.  The  assassination  of  an  Austrian 
prince,  a  mere  police  court  case,  lit  the  fuse.  Acci- 
dent alone  was  responsible  for  that.  The  fuse  might 
have  been  trampled  out;  but  the  Kaiser  and  his 
counsellors  held  back,  held  others  back.  Germany 
was  responsible  for  that — Germany  and  an  aristo- 
cratic, militarist  system,  "prepared  to  the  last 
buckle."  On  the  day  of  mobilization,  the  French 
conscripts  went  to  their  appointed  places  sober  or 
pale  or  weeping  according  to  their  individual  char- 
acters. The  first  young  British  volunteers  marched 
to  the  recruiting  offices  with  a  solemn  consecration 


22  THE  NEXT  WAR 

in  their  faces,  as  men  who  go  to  take  a  sacrament. 
The  Germans  rushed  to  arms  shouting  and  singing. 
During  the  early  days  of  the  Belgian  invasion  a  Ger- 
man Junker  officer,  who  seemed  well  informed  upon 
events  within  the  enemy  lines,  spoke  to  me  with 
tears  of  pride  in  his  eyes  concerning  this  contrast. 
"Ah,  Germany  was  beautiful — beautiful !"  he  said. 


CHAPTER  III 

SECOND   YPRES 

So  the  nations  went  to  war,  armed  to  the  teeth, 
ready  as  nations  never  were  before.  It  was  to  be 
a  supreme  struggle;  all  intelligent  Europe  knew 
that.  Every  available  ounce  of  national  resource, 
human  material  and  energy  was  necessary  to  victory. 
If  the  rest  did  not  understand,  Germany  soon  taught 
them.  And  from  the  beginning,  the  "code  of  civi- 
lized warfare"  began  to  melt  away.  In  the  first 
week,  Great  Britain  and  Germany  both  violated  its 
spirit  if  not  its  letter.  It  was  provided  in  the  code 
that  when  siege  was  laid  to  a  city  the  non-combatants 
must  have  a  chance  to  get  away  in  order  to  escape 
starvation  as  well  as  bombardment.  With  her  domi- 
nant navy,  England  at  once  put  a  food-blockade  on 
Germany.  She  knew  that  Germany  produced  but 
80  per  cent  of  her  own  food;  and  that  this  was  done 
only  through  intensive  fertilization  and  the  em- 
ployment in  harvest  and  plowing  time  of  a  million 
and  a  half  Russian  laborers.  The  state  of  war  would 
reduce  the  supply  of  fertilizers,  would  cut  off  the 
Russian  laborers,  would  take  from  the  land  most  of 
the  domestic  laborers.    It  was  possible,  other  means 

23 


24  THE  NEXT  WAR 

failing,  to  starve  out  Germany,  the  weakest  civilian 
baby  as  well  as  the  strongest  soldier.  From  the 
first  day  of  the  war — in  plan  if  not  at  once  in  ac- 
tion— Germany  prepared  in  the  same  way  to  starve 
out  the  British  Isles  with  submarines.  When  she 
applied  her  submarine  campaign,  Germany  violated 
at  once  an  old  article  of  the  code  which  provided 
that  merchant  ships,  about  to  be  sunk  for  carrying 
contraband,  must  be  warned  and  searched  and  that 
their  crews  must  be  allowed  to  escape.  She  began 
to  sink  without  warning.  If  Germany  abandoned 
this  method  in  19 15,  it  was  only  because  the  United 
States  protested,  and  she  feared  to  drag  us  into 
the  war  against  her.  She  resumed  her  original  plan 
in  1917,  and  we  did  enter  the  war. 

It  was  provided  in  the  code  that  civilians  should 
be  given  warning  of  a  bombardment.  But  the  aero- 
planes had  arrived;  and  aeroplane  tactics  depend  not 
only  upon  speed  but  upon  surprise.  In  the  first 
fortnight  of  the  war  and  as  unexpectedly  as  a  bolt 
of  lightning  from  a  clear  sky,  a  German  Taube  ap- 
peared over  Paris,  dropped  a  bomb  which  blew  in 
the  front  of  a  shop  and  killed  two  civilian  butchers 
peacefully  wrapping  up  meat.  Germany  invaded 
Belgium.  As  part  of  her  long-studied  plan  for  keep- 
ing everything  serene  on  her  line  of  communica- 
tions against  France,  she  seized  as  hostages  a  few 
leading  citizens  of  each  town  through  which  she 
passed,  shot  them  if  the  town  did  not  behave.  And 
the  taking  of  hostages  had  been  so  long  abrogated 


SECOND  YPRES  25 

by  the  code  that  a  French  Encyclopedia  of  War  is- 
sued in  the  sixties  of  the  last  century  defined  it  as 
"a  usage  of  barbarous  and  semi-civilized  warfare, 
for  centuries  discontinued  by  civilized  nations."  The 
"code"  was  going  fast.  A  structure  of  merciful  if 
superficial  ethics  which  had  been  three  centuries 
building  was  toppled  over  in  two  weeks. 

Eight  months  later,  humanity  arrived  at  a  date  as 
significant  in  our  annals,  I  think,  as  October  12, 
1492  or  July  4,  1776.  It  is  April  22,  1915,  during 
the  Second  Battle  of  Ypres.  That  day,  the  Germans 
rolled  across  the  Western  trench-line  a  cloud  of 
iridescent  chlorine  gas  which  sent  French,  Arab, 
English  and  Canadian  soldiers  by  the  thousands 
back  to  the  hospitals,  coughing  and  choking  them- 
selves to  death  from  rotted,  inflamed  lungs.  Had 
the  German  General  Staff  possessed  imagination 
enough  to  use  gas  wholesale  instead  of  retail  on  that 
day,  they  might  have  won  their  war  then  and  there. 

The  significance  of  the  second  Battle  of  Ypres 
needs  explanation. 

Through  all  the  centuries  of  mechanical  and  scien- 
tific improvement,  military  armament — the  means  of 
killing  men — had  lagged  behind.  The  primitive  man 
killed  in  war  by  hitting  his  opponent  with  a  hard 
substance — a  club  or  stone.  Later,  he  sharpened  the 
stone  so  that  It  would  more  readily  reach  a  vital  spot, 
and  had  a  knife  or  a  sword.  He  mounted  the  knife 
on  a  stick  to  give  himself  greater  reach,  and  had  a 
spear.     He  discovered  the  projecting  power  of  the 


26  THE  NEXT  WAR 

bow,  which  would  send  a  small  spear  beyond  his 
own  reach.  Gunpowder  arrived;  that  gave  still 
further  and  more  powerful  projection.  But  the 
principle,  the  one  method  of  killing  a  man  in  war, 
remained  the  same — hit  him  with  something  hard. 
We  had  learned  many  ways  of  controlling  and  trans- 
muting for  the  purposes  of  ordinary  life  the  power 
stored  up  by  the  sun — steam,  electricity,  the  energy 
of  falling  water.  Military  science  knew  but  one 
way — the  explosion  of  chemicals.  If  we  look  into 
a  battleship,  that  "great,  floating  watch,"  we  marvel 
at  the  intricacy  of  her  machinery.  But  we  should 
find  that  the  engines,  the  turbines,  the  delicate  and 
complicated  electrical  instruments,  are  all  devices 
first  invented  for  purely  industrial  activities  and 
merely  adapted  for  war.  We  should  find  the  guns, 
the  actual  killing  instrument,  among  the  simplest 
machines  on  board.  In  centuries  of  mechanical  in- 
vention and  mechanical  improvement,  very  little 
higher  intelligence  and  no  genius  at  all  had  been  put 
into  the  mechanics  of  killing  men. 

There  were  good  reasons.  The  men  who  dis- 
covered the  great  principles  back  of  modern  machin- 
ery and  industrial  method,  such  as  Newton  in  physics, 
Friar  Bacon  and  Faraday  in  chemistry^  Ampere  and 
Volta  in  electricity,  were  concerned  only  with  pure 
science,  with  extending  the  field  of  human  knowledge. 
The  clever  inventors  and  adapters — such  as 
Stephenson  with  his  locomotive,  Morse  with  his  tele- 
graph,  Edison  with  his  electric  light   and  phono- 


SECOND  YPilES  27 

graph,  Marconi  with  his  v/ireless,  Langley  and  the 
Wrights  with  their  aeroplanes — were  concerned  with 
improving  the  civilian  processes  of  production  and 
transportation,  or  with  adding  material  richness  to 
modern  life.  Those  who,  in  biology  and  kindred 
sciences,  followed  the  paths  blazed  by  the  giants  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  were  even  more  directly 
benevolent  in  their  ends.  Ehrlich  and  Takamine 
worked  to  save,  preserve  and  lengthen  human  life. 
No  first-class  scientific  mind  was  interested  in  re- 
search having  for  its  end  to  destroy  human  life. 

Nor  did  the  military  caste,  whose  business — 
stripped  of  all  its  gold  lace  and  brass  buttons — was 
to  kill,  add  anything  fundamental  to  the  science  of 
destruction.  It  is  traditional  that  what  few  real 
improvements  there  have  been  in  armament,  such  as 
the  machine-gun  and  the  submarine,  were  invented 
by  civihans  and  by  them  sold  to  armies.  Military 
life  tends  to  destroy  originality.  It  makes  for  dar- 
ing action,  makes  against  daring  thought.  In  the 
second  place,  there  was  the  code.  Professional  sol- 
diers wanted,  sincerely  wanted,  to  render  warfare 
as  merciful  as  possible.  They  shrank  from  carrying 
the  thing  out  to  its  logical  conclusion.  Killing  by 
gas  had  been  theoretically  proposed  long  before  the 
war;  and  most  military  men  had  repudiated  the  idea. 
They  had  even  fixed  their  objection  in  the  stern 
agreements  of  the  Second  Hague  Conference. 

But  from  April  22,  19 15  that  agreement  and  all 
similar  agreements  were  abrogated.     The  Germans 


28  THE  NEXT  WAR 

had  found  a  new  method,  with  enormous  possibili- 
ties, for  killing  men.  This  weapon  was  powerful 
enough  to  win  the  war,  if  the  Allies  refused  to  reply 
in  kind.  They  did  reply  in  kind.  From  that  mo- 
ment, to  use  the  language  of  the  streets,  the  lid  was 
off.  Nations,  instead  of  merely  armies,  were  by  now 
mobilized  for  war.  Those  great  and  httle  scientific 
minds,  engaged  hitherto  in  searching  for  abstract 
truth  or  in  multiplying  the  richness  of  life  and  the 
wealth  of  nations,  could  be  turned  toward  the  inven- 
tion of  means  of  destruction  whether  they  wished 
or  no.  A  new  area  of  human  consciousness  was 
brought  to  fruition,  A  new  power  in  men  was  un- 
loosed and  this  one  most  sinister.  Its  established 
past  performances,  its  probable  future  results,  I 
shall  consider  elsewhere. 

This  release  and  stimulation  of  the  human  imagi- 
nation for  the  business  of  killing  was  perhaps  the 
main  social  event  of  the  Great  War.  But  I  hinted 
at  another  almost  equally  important  when  I  said 
above  that  nations  instead  of  armies  were  now 
mobilized  for  war. 

The  Germans  had  entered  Armageddon  with  an 
unprecedented  equipment  of  munitions.  The  elec- 
tric-minded French  perceived  at  once,  the  slower- 
minded  British  only  a  little  later,  that  this  was  to 
be  a  war  of  factories  as  well  as  of  men  and  bent  all 
their  resources  toward  organizing  the  national  life 
for  this  purpose.     Every  woman  enlisted  in  muni- 


SECOND  YPRES  29 

tions-making,  in  agriculture,  in  clerical  work  for  the 
business  offices  of  war,  released  a  soldier  to  the 
Front.  Women  were  drawn  in  by  the  thousands,  later 
by  the  millions.  At  the  end  of  the  war  Great 
Britain,  homeland  and  Colonies  together,  had  in 
arms  less  than  five  million  soldiers;  but  homeland 
and  Colonies  together  were  employing  three  million 
women  in  the  direct  processes  of  war,  besides  mil- 
lions of  others  who  gave  as  volunteers  a  part  of  their 
time.  It  became  a  stock  statement  that  if  the  women 
of  either  side  should  quit  their  war-work,  that  side 
would  lose. 

Now  since  munitions  and  food  had  grown  as  im- 
portant as  men,  since  to  stop  or  hinder  the  enemy 
munitions  manufacture  or  agricultural  production 
was  to  make  toward  victor}^  the  women  in  war  were 
fair  game.  Near  London  stood  the  great  Woolwich 
munition  works  and  armory,  turning  out  guns,  ex- 
plosives and  shells.  Probably  before  the  end  of  the 
war,  as  many  women  worked  there  as  men.  It  was 
raided  again  and  again  by  German  aircraft.  Why 
not?  Totally  to  destroy  the  Woolwich  works  would 
be  equivalent  for  purposes  of  victory  to  destroying 
several  divisions.  The  old  code  was  logical  for  its 
time  when  it  forbade  the  killing  of  women  and  other 
non-combatants.  Then,  killing  a  woman  had  no 
point.     Now  it  had  a  most  significant  point. 

The  same  stern  logic  of  "military  necessity"  lay 
behind  the  continual  air  raids  on  cities,  fortified  and 


30  THE  NEXT  WAR 

unfortified.  Germany  began  this  process.  She  was 
in  a  position  to  do  so.  She  held  the  advanced  lines. 
Her  front  was  only  seventy  miles  from  the  capital 
and  metropolis  of  France,  less  than  a  hundred  from 
that  of  Britain,  whereas,  to  attack  Berlin,  the  En- 
tente Allies  must  travel  by  air  nearly  four  hundred 
miles.  Tons  of  illogically  sentimental  propaganda 
have  been  published  concerning  these  air-raids.  In 
the  beginning,  the  intention  vt^as,  on  any  standard 
barbarous,  cruel,  and  stupid.  The  German  General 
Staff,  rich  In  scientific  knowledge  but  poor  In  the 
understanding  of  human  nature,  thought  by  this 
means  to  "break  down  the  resistance"  of  the  hostile 
peoples,  to  bully  them  into  a  submissive  attitude.  In 
this  they  failed  utterly;  air  raids  had  rather  the  effect 
of  lashing  the  French  and  British  into  increased 
effort. 

But  the  raids  were  continued  for  a  more  prac- 
tical purpose.  The  nerve-centres  of  war  are  in  the 
great  cities,  and  mainly  in  the  capitals.  Suppose 
for  an  extreme  example  that  the  Germans  in  one 
overwhelming  raid  or  a  series  of  raids  had  destroyed 
Paris.  All  the  main  railroad  lines  which  supplied 
the  army  at  the  front  ran  through  Paris.  There, 
the  trains  were  switched,  rearranged  and  made  up. 
In  Paris  also  were  the  headquarters  of  those  in- 
numerable bureaus  vitally  necessary  to  the  conduct 
of  modern  war,  with  all  Its  complexities  and  co- 
ordinations. Had  the  railroad  connections  been 
destroyed,  had  the  bureaus  lost  their  quarters,  their 


SECOND  YPRES  31 

books,  their  personnel,  the  French  army  at  the  front 
must  have  been  thrown  into  confusion. 

By  the  same  token  the  more  they  approximated 
to  this  end,  the  m.ore  the  air-bombardments  made 
toward  victory.  Both  Parisians  and  Londoners  have 
expressed  to  me  the  opinion  that  the  Gotha  raids 
and  the  Big  Bertha  bombardments  were  "worth 
while"  for  the  effect  they  had  on  the  business  of  life. 
"There's  no  use  in  denying,"  said  an  Englishman, 
"that  we  did  less  work  than  usual — at  least  a  quarter 
less — on  the  days  of  air  raids." 

Still  further:  defence  against  air-raids  is  very  dif- 
ficult; so  the  French,  for  example,  were  forced  to 
hold  back  from  the  Front  in  order  to  defend  their 
capital  scores  of  aeroplanes  and  many  batteries  of 
guns,  whereas  the  Germans  seldom  raided  with  more 
than  a  dozen  aeroplanes.  That  factor  alone  made 
air  raids  useful  for  strictly  military  ends.  When 
the  Allies  began  raiding  German  cities  in  19 17  and 
191 8,  when  they  prepared  to  raid  Berlin  on  an  un- 
precedented scale  in  that  campaign  of  19 19  which 
never  occurred,  they  were  not  mainly  inspired  by 
revenge,  as  horror-stricken  German  civilians  and 
war-heated  AUied  civilians  asserted.  The  General 
Staff  were  after  results,  not  personal  satisfaction. 
They  knew  that  aeroplane  raids  on  cities  brought 
military  results.  Still  further;  they  knew  that  armies 
exist  and  operate  for  the  defence  of  peoples.  The 
object  of  wars,  after  all,  is  not  the  destruction  of 
armies.     It  is  the  subjugation  of  peoples.     In  strik- 


32  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ing  at  the  great  cities  they  were  striking,  a  little 
blindly  as  yet  but  still  directly,  at  the  heart  of 
resistance. 

Of  course,  when  you  attack  and  bombard  a  city 
without  warning — and  an  air  raid,  to  be  effective 
must  come  without  warning — you  include  in  the 
circle  of  destruction  every  living  thing  in  that  city, 
the  weakest  non-combatant  with  the  strongest  sol- 
dier. "Baby  killers"  the  Londoners  called  the  Zep- 
pelins. They  were  just  that;  for  baby-killing  had 
become  incidental  to  military  necessity. 

Let  me  here  add  another  departure  from  the 
"code,"  less  significant  than  the  new  ways  of 
killing  and  the  inclusion  of  all  civilians  in  the 
circle  of  destruction,  but  still  important  to  human- 
ity. Under  its  spirit,  usually  under  the  letter,  an 
army  destroyed  property  only  when  that  destruc- 
tion would  weaken  the  enemy's  armed  forces  and  his 
general  military  resistance.  Sherman's  devastation 
during  his  march  to  the  sea  was  ruthless  and  terrible, 
and  is  not  yet  forgotten  in  the  South.  But  it  had  a 
direct  military  object — to  render  impossible  the  pro- 
visioning of  the  Confederate  Army.  The  Germans, 
setting  the  pace,  carried  the  logic  of  destruction  one 
stage  further.  In  their  early  rush  they  had  taken 
and  held  securely  the  coal  mines  of  Northern 
France.  Those  mines,  yielding  half  of  the  French 
native  coal  supply,  they  deliberately  flooded  and  de- 
stroyed. This  had  no  immediate  military  purpose. 
In  German  hands,   the  mines  were  useless  to  the 


SECOND  YPRES  33 

French  army.  No,  the  German  General  Staff  wanted 
simply  to  weaken  France  permanently,  to  make  that 
part  which  they  did  not  seize  in  their  proposed 
German  peace  a  subject  nation  commercially.  The 
collapse  of  the  Germans  in  19 18  was  so  sudden  that 
the  Allies  did  not  enter  her  territory  while  in  a  state 
of  war  and  it  is  impossible  to  say  that  they  would 
not,  in  other  circumstances,  have  followed  the  gen- 
eral rule  of  war  and  replied  in  kind. 

Let  me  go  no  further  with  all  this,  but  summarize : 
"The  Code,"  a  merciful  though  artificial  body  of 
ethics,  built  up  by  Christianity  and  all  other  hu- 
manitarian forces  through  two  thousand  years  of 
warfare,  had  collapsed.  In  most  respects,  we  were 
back  to  the  ethics  of  the  barbarian  hordes.  The  bar- 
barians of  the  twentieth  century  B.  C.  killed  in  any 
manner  which  their  Imaginations  suggested;  so  now 
did  civilized  men  of  the  twentieth  century  A.  D. 
The  barbarian  of  the  twentieth  century  B.  C.  killed 
the  women  and  children  of  the  enemy  as  tribal  self- 
interest  seemed  to  dictate;  as  now  did  the  civilized 
men  of  the  twentieth  century  A.  D.  The  barbarians 
of  the  twentieth  century  B.  C.  made  slaves  of  the 
conquered  people  or  forced  them  to  pay  tribute;  so 
virtually — in  such  acts  as  the  destruction  of  the 
French  mines — did  civihzed  men  of  the  twentieth 
century  A.  D. 

In  only  two  important  respects  did  the  code  still 
stand  when  we  emerged  from  the  Great  War  of 
19. 14-18.      We   were    generally   sparing   prisoners, 


34  THE  NEXT  WAR 

granting  life  to  those  who  gave  up  resistance  and 
surrendered.  But  would  this  article  have  stood  in 
case  the  war  went  on?  Germany  held  several  mil- 
lions of  French,  British,  Belgian,  Italian  and  Rus- 
sian prisoners.  At  an  ever-increasing  pace,  she  was 
being  starved  out.  Suppose  she  had  elected  to  de- 
fend herself  literally  to  the  last  life,  as  besieged 
cities  have  often  done?  With  an  underfed  army, 
with  civilians  dropping  dead  of  starvation  in  the 
streets — what  of  the  prisoners?  She  could  not  send 
them  back  to  multiply  the  number  of  her  enemies. 
She  could  not  dump  them  into  the  adjacent  neutral 
nations  to  devour  their  scanty  supplies  of  food. 
Rather  than  face  this,  Switzerland  or  Holland 
would  have  entered  the  war  against  Germany.  What 
might  have  become  of  the  prisoners? 

Only  one  article  of  the  code  stood  firm.  With 
occasional  violations,  the  "right  of  the  wounded" 
was  respected.  Speaking  generally,  both  sides 
spared  the  hospitals. 

And  with  the  break-down  of  "the  code,"  another 
sinister  factor,  unknown  to  the  barbarians,  had  en- 
tered warfare — that  exact  scientific  method  of  re- 
search which  has  wrought  all  our  miracles  of  in- 
dustry was  at  the  service  of  the  warriors.  The  cur- 
rent of  scientific  work  and  thought,  flowing  hitherto 
toward  improvement  of  mankind,  was  now  dammed; 
it  was  flowing  backward,  toward  the  destruction  of 
mankind. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   NEW   WARFARE 

Now  let  US  take  up  one  by  one  the  new  factors  in 
warfare  introduced  by  the  Great  War  of  19 14-18, 
and  see  what  effects  they  had  on  that  war,  what 
inevitable  or  probable  effects  on  "the  next  war." 
To  make  it  all  easier  to  follow,  let  us  begin  with  that 
factor  which  we  can  grasp  most  readily — the  busi- 
ness of  killing.  Here,  in  treating  of  the  past,  I  shall 
take  testimony  of  the  war  itself  mostly  from  my 
own  direct  or  second-hand  observations,  extending 
from  the  Battle  of  Mons  to  the  Battle  of  the  Ar- 
gonne ;  and  in  speculating  on  the  future  mostly  from 
the  sayings  and  writings  of  professional  soldiers, 
many  of  them — though  not  all — thorough  behevers 
in  militarism  and  "the  next  war." 

After  the  Second  Battle  of  Ypres  Hfted  the  lid, 
those  men  of  science,  those  high  technicians,  who  had 
put  themselves  at  the  service  of  armies,  experi- 
mented with  new  methods  of  killing.  Liquid  flame 
— burning  men  alive — was  introduced  on  the  West- 
ern front.  This  proved  of  only  limited  usefulness. 
The  British  introduced  the  tanks.  These  were  im- 
portant to  the  general  change  in  warfare,  as  I  shall 

35 


36  THE  NEXT  WAR 

show  later;  but  they  added  nothing  to  the  direct 
process  of  destroying  life.  Gas  seemed  by  all  odds 
the  most  promising  of  the  new  weapons.  That 
simple  chlorine  which  the  Germans  used  in  191 5 
gave  place  to  other  gases  more  complex  and  more 
destructive  to  human  body-cells.  At  first  released 
only  In  clouds  and  dependent  upon  a  favorable  wind 
for  thelr.effect,  the  chemicals  which  generated  these 
gases  were  later  loaded  Into  shells  and  projected 
miles  beyond  any  danger  to  the  army  which  employed 
them. 

As  gas  Improved,  so  did  the  defence  against  It. 
The  crude  mouth-pads,  consisting  of  a  strip  of  gauze 
soaked  In  "anti-chlorine"  chemicals,  which  the 
women  of  England  rushed  to  the  Front  after  Second 
Ypres,  were  succeeded  by  more  secure  and  cumber- 
some masks.  The  standard  mask  worn  by  the 
Americans  In  19 18  was  a  complex  machine.  It  was 
cleverly  constructed  to  fit  the  face  air-tight;  Its  tank 
held  antidotes  for  all  known  German  gases.  How- 
ever, this  was  an  Imperfect  protection,  because  men 
could  not  or  would  not  wear  It  all  the  time.  It  took 
the  sternest  discipline  to  make  troops  keep  on  their 
masks  even  In  time  of  danger.  Surprise  gas-bom- 
bardments were  always  catching  them  unmasked.  A 
slight  leak  was  fatal.  In  that  stage  of  chemical 
warfare,  the  losses  from  gas-shells  in  proportion  to 
the  quantity  used,  were  at  least  as  great  as  those 
from  high-explosive  shells. 

Yet  the  mask  was  a  protection;  let  us  therefore 


THE  NEW  WARFARE  37 

study  to  beat  it.  In  the  spring  attack  of  19 18,  the 
Germans  introduced  their  "mustard  gas."  Unlike 
its  forerunners,  it  was  poisonous  to  the  skin  as  well 
as  to  the  lungs.  Breathed,  it  was  deadly;  where  it 
touched  the  skin,  it  produced  terrible  burns  which 
resisted  all  ordinary  treatment.  These  wounds  were 
not  fatal  unless  they  covered  great  areas  of  the  body. 
In  that,  mustard  gas  was  unsatisfactory. 

Now  in  all  the  experiments  following  Second 
Ypres,  the  chemists  had  in  mind  three  qualities  of  the 
ideal  killing  gas.  First,  it  should  be  invisible,  thus 
introducing  the  element  of  surprise.  The  early, 
crude  gases,  even  in  small  quantities,  betrayed  their 
presence  by  the  tinge  they  gave  the  atmosphere. 
Second,  it  should  be  a  little  heavier  than  the  atmos- 
phere; it  should  tend  to  sink,  so  as  to  penetrate 
dugouts  and  cellars.  Third,  it  should  poison — not 
merely  burn — all  exposed  areas  of  the  body.  Ameri- 
can ingenuity  solved  the  problem.  At  the  time  of 
the  Armistice,  we  were  manufacturing  for  the  cam- 
paign of  19 19  our  Lewisite  gas.  It  was  invisible; 
it  was  a  sinking  gas,  which  would  search  out  the 
refugees  of  dugouts  and  cellars;  if  breathed,  it  killed 
at  once — and  it  killed  not  only  through  the  lungs. 
Wherever  it  settled  on  the  skin,  it  produced  a  poison 
wihich  penetrated  the  system  and  brought  almost 
certain  death.  It  was  inimical  to  all  cell-life,  ani- 
mal or  vegetable.  Masks  alone  were  of  no  use 
against  it.  Further,  it  had  fifty-jive  times  the 
"spread"  of  any  poison  gas  hitherto  used  in  the  war. 


38  THE  NEXT  WAR 

An  expert  has  said  that  a  dozen  Lewisite  air  bombs 
of  the  greatest  size  in  use  during  191 8  might  with 
a  favorable  wind  have  eliminated  the  population  of 
Berlin.  Possibly  he  exaggerated,  but  probably  not 
greatly.  The  Armistice  came;  but  gas  research  went 
on.  Now  we  have  more  than  a  hint  of  a  gas  beyond 
Lewisite.  It  cannot  be  much  more  deadly;  but  in 
proportion  to  the  amount  of  chemical  which  gen- 
erates it,  the  spread  is  far  greater.  A  mere  capsule 
of  this  gas  in  a  small  grenade  can  generate  square 
rods  and  even  acres  of  death  in  the  absolute.  .  .  . 

So  much  at  present  for  gas.  It  is  the  new  factor, 
the  one  which  may  hold  the  greatest  promise  for  fu- 
ture improvement  in  war.  But  there  has  been  much 
improvement  in  certain  methods  already  known  and 
used,  which  in  future  wars  may  be  auxiliary  to 
gas.  There  was  the  old,  stock  weapon  of  modern 
wars — the  tube  from  which  hard  substances  were 
projected  by  chemical  explosion — in  short,  the  gun. 
In  proportion  to  initial  cost,  the  power  of  the  gun 
and  of  the  auxiliary  explosion  its  chemical  had  in- 
creased enormously.  The  smokeless  TNT  and  other 
high  explosives  employed  in  this  war  were  but 
little  more  expensive,  pound  for  pound,  than  the  old 
black  powder  of  past  wars;  in  effect  they  were  in- 
comparably more  destructive.  Men  in  war  defended 
themselves  against  this  increased  destructive  power 
by  an  old  method  made  new;  they  burrowed  deep 
into  the  inert  earth.  But  even  at  that,  destruction 
proceeded  faster  than  the  defence  against  destruc- 


THE  NEW  WARFARE  39 

tion — hence  the  unprecedented  death-list  of  this  war. 

When  we  came  to  the  vital  element  of  property 
— the  accumulated  wealth  of  the  world — we  find 
the  disparity  between  cost  and  effect  much  greater. 

Let  us  reason  here  by  example:  the  battle  of 
Waterloo,  whose  glories  and  horrors  Europe  sang 
for  a  'hundred  years,  resolved  itself  at  one  stage  into 
a  struggle  for  Hougoumont  Chateau,  All  through 
the  battle,  French  and  British  regiments,  supported 
by  artillery,  were  fighting  for  that  group  of  buildings. 
The  guide  to  the  Chateau  points  out  to  the  tourist 
the  existing  marks  of  artillery  fire  and  the  restora- 
tions. A  corner  knocked  off  from  the  chapel,  a  tiny 
outhouse  battered  down,  a  few  holes  in  the  walls  no 
bigger  at  most  than  a  wash-tub — that  is  the  extent  of 
the  damage.  Now  while  it  is  impossible  to  make  an 
accurate  estimate,  it  Is  still  quite  certain  that  the 
damage  to  Hougoumont  Chateau  was  smaller  in 
money  value  than  the  cost  of  the  cannon-balls,  shells 
and  gun-powder  which  caused  it.  By  contrast:  dur- 
ing 19 1 6,  the  Germans  dropped  into  the  town  of 
Nancy  some  of  their  380-millimetre  shells — the  larg- 
est and  most  expensive  generally  used  in  the  war. 
The  cost  of  such  shells  was  probably  between  three 
and  four  thousand  dollars.  I  was  in  Nancy  during 
one  such  bombardment,  when  a  big  school  house  was 
hit  directly.  It  seemed  literally  to  have  melted.  In 
restoring  it  after  the  war,  the  French  had  to  re- 
build from  the  ground.  And  that  school  house  cost 
more  than  two  hundred  thousand  dollars.    As  a  gen- 


40  THE  NEXT  WAR 

eral  rule,  when  a  shell  of  the  Great  War  hit  a  build- 
ing, it  destroyed  much  more  value  in  property  than 
its  own  cost  plus  that  of  its  projecting  charge.  The 
shells  which  missed  are  aside  from  this  discussion; 
for  the  artillerymen  of  Napoleon's  army  missed  just 
as  often  in  proportion. 

Yet  Nature  always  imposes  limits  on  human  in- 
genuity. We  arrive  at  a  point  beyond  which  we 
cannot  much  further  improve  any  given  device.  Mili- 
tary experts  generally  agree  that  we  have  about 
reached  fhat  impasse  with  guns  and  their  explosive 
projectiles.  The  "Big  Bertha"  which  bombarded 
Paris  from  a  distance  of  seventy  miles  was  only  an 
apparent  exception.  It  was  not  a  real  improvement; 
it  was  a  "morale  gun,"  useful  to  the  "psychological 
campaign"  of  the  Germans.  It  had  no  accuracy; 
the  gunners  "ranged"  it  on  Paris  in  general,  and 
the  shells,  according  to  atmospheric  conditions,  fell 
anywhere  over  an  area  some  four  or  five  miles  across. 

No;  there  will  be  no  great  improvements  in  guns 
and  high-explosive  projectiles.  Even  if  we  have  not 
reached  the  limit  of  invention,  other  methods  of  de- 
stroying life  and  property  hold  out  much  more 
promise.  Among  these  is  the  aeroplane.  There, 
we  have  not  nearly  reached  the  barrier  set  by  Na- 
ture upon  Ingenuity. 

A  modern  weapon  works  by  two  distinct  processes 
— the  projection,  which  sends  the  death-tool  far  into 
the  region  of  the  enemy  and  the  action — usually 
some   kind  of   explosion — by  which   it  kills.     The 


ARTILLERY    FIRE    IN    1815 

Hougoumont  Chateau.  During  the  Battle  of  Waterloo,  it  was 
bombarded  all  day  by  Napoleon's  cannon.  Result:  A  small  out- 
building wrecked  (ruin  in  the  foreground),  a  corner  at  the  peak 
of  the  chapel  (to  the  left)  knocked  off,  and  some  small  holes,  since 
repaired,  in  the  front  walls  and  the   roofs. 


-ta»i»3««a«(gisg,^ 


ARTILLERY   FIRE   IN   1915 

A   chateau    in   Northern    France.      It   was   wrecked   by    a   single 
big-calibre  German  shell. 


THE  NEW  WARFARE  41 

bombing  aeroplane  is  essentially  an  instrument  of 
projection.  It  extends  "range"  beyond  any  distance 
possible  to  a  gun.  The  army  aeroplanes  of  19 14 
were,  in  19 16,  mentioned  by  the  aviators  as  "those 
old-fashioned  'busses'."  In  19 18,  airmen  employed 
similar  scornful  language  concerning  the  machines 
of  19 1 6.  However,  the  range  of  the  19 14  aero- 
planes greatly  excelled  that  of  any  gun;  they  could 
venture  at  least  a  hundred  miles  from  their  bases. 
By  19 1 8,  they  were  venturing  two  or  three  hundred 
miles;  and  the  Allied  armies  planned,  in  the  spring 
of  1 9 19,  to  make  regular  raids  on  Berlin,  some  four 
hundred  miles  away. 

To  adopt  again  the  terminology  of  artillery;  as 
the  aeroplane  grew  in  range,  so  did  it  grow  in 
calibre.  The  bombs  dropped  on  Paris  in  19 14  were 
not  much  bigger  than  a  grape-fruit;  the  bombs  pre- 
pared for  Berlin  in  19 19  were  eight  feet  high  and 
carried  half  a  ton  of  explosive  or  gas-generating 
chemicals.  Not  only  were  they  greater  in  them- 
selves than  any  gun-shell,  but  they  carried  a  heav- 
ier bursting-charge  in  proportion  to  their  size.  As 
you  increase  the  calibre  and  range  of  a  gun,  you 
must  increase  the  thickness  of  the  steel  casing  which 
forms  the  shell,  and  correspondingly  reduce  the  pro- 
portion of  explosives  or  gas-forming  chemical.  But 
an  air  bomb — which  is  dropped,  not  fired — needs 
only  a  very  thin  casing.  A  big  shell  is  in  bulk  mostly 
steel;  an  air  bomb  is  mostly  chemical.  It  was  in 
shells  like   these  that  we  would  have  packed  our 


42  THE  NEXT  WAR 

Lewisite  gas  had  we  decided  to  "eliminate  all  life 
in  Berlin." 

However,  air-bombardment  was  during  the  Great 
War  essentially  inaccurate.  A  gun,  in  land  opera- 
tions, is  fired  from  a  solid  base;  the  artilleryman 
can  aim  at  his  leisure.  A  bomb  Is  dropped  from  a 
base  which  is  not  only  in  rapid  motion  but  par- 
takes of  the  instability  of  the  air;  the  bombing  avi- 
ator must  make  an  inconceivably  rapid  snapshot. 
Still,  even  at  this  crude  stage,  air-fire  grew  much 
more  accurate.  In  19 14  and  19 15,  the  bombs  sel- 
dom hit  their  objective,  unless  that  objective  were 
a  city  in  general.  By  191 8,  they  were  usually  hit- 
ting on  or  near  their  targets.  It  was  still,  however, 
mostly  a  matter  of  individual  skill,  not  of  accurate 
machine-work. 

Then,  just  before  the  Armistice,  an  American, 
binding  together  many  inventions  made  by  civilians 
for  civilian  purposes,  showed  a  dazzling  way  to  the 
warfare  of  the  future.  He  proved  that  aeroplanes, 
flying  without  pilots,  could  be  steered  accurately 
by  wireless.  This  meant  that  the  aeroplane  had 
become  a  super-gun.  Calibre  was  increased  in- 
definitely. An  aeroplane  could  now  carry  explo- 
sive-charges or  gas-charges  up  to  its  whole  lift- 
ing capacity  of  many  tons.  It  was  no  longer  merely 
a  vehicle;  it  could  be  virtually  a  self-propelling  shell. 
And  in  the  matter  of  accuracy,  the  uncertain  human 
factor  was  nearly  eliminated,  as  happens  in  most 
highly-improved  machines.     An  expert  on  this  kind 


THE   INCREASING   S^ZE   OF  BOMBS 

(Left)  A  bomb  in  1914-15.  A  sample  of  the  largest  aerial 
bomb    used    at    the   beginning   of   the    war. 

(Right)  A  bomb  in  1918.  This  bomb  carried  an  explosive 
charge   of  one  ton,   and  was   prepared   to   bomb   Berlin   in    1919. 


THE  NEW  WARFARE  43 

of  marksmanship,  hovering  in  an  aeroplane  or 
Zepplin  many  miles  away,  with  a  fleet  of  protecting 
battle-planes  guarding  him  to  prevent  hurried  work- 
manship, could  guide  these  explosive  fleets  to  their 
objective  whether  town  or  fortress.  Here,  in  effect, 
was  a  gun  with  a  range  as  long  as  the  width  of  Eu- 
ropean nations,  a  bursting  charge  beyond  the  previ- 
ous imaginations  of  gunnery. 


CHAPTER  V 

TACTICS    OF   THE    NEXT   WAR 

Now  before  going  further,  let  us  pull  together 
our  argument,  so  far  as  it  has  gone. 

Here  is  a  projectile — the  bomb-carrying  aero- 
plane— of  unprecedented  size  and  almost  unlimited 
range;  here  is  a  killing  instrument — gas — of  a  power 
beyond  the  dream  of  a  madman;  here  is  a  scheme 
of  warfare  which  inevitably  draws  those  who  were 
hitherto  regarded  as  non-combatants  into  the  cate- 
gory of  fair  game.  We  need  but  combine  these  three 
factors  in  our  imaginations,  and  we  have  a  prob- 
ability of  "the  next  war"  between  civilized  and  pre- 
pared nations.  It  will  be,  in  one  phase,  a  war  of 
aeroplanes  loaded  with  gas  shells.  And  professional 
military  men  in  all  lands  are  remarking  among  them- 
selves that  the  new  warfare  may — some  say  must — 
strike  not  only  at  armies  but  at  the  heart  of  the 
matter — peoples. 

A  Prussian  officer,  of  the  old  school  said  to  his 
American  captor  in  191 8,  "France  is  the  sheepfold 
and  Germany  is  the  wolf.  The  French  army  is  the 
shepherd's  dog.  The  wolf  fights  the  dog  only  in 
order  to  get  at  the  sheep.     It  is  the  sheepfold  we 

44 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        45 

want."  Upon  such  sentiments  the  Allied  world 
looked  with  some  horror — then.  Even  the  Ger- 
mans somewhat  withheld  their  hands.  I  cannot  find 
that  gas-bombardment  was  ever  used  on  the  cities 
behind  the  lines.  Yet  the  Germans  were  prepar- 
ing in  191 8  a  step  toward  that  method.  Had  the 
war  continued,  Paris  would  have  been  attacked 
from  the  air  on  a  new  plan.  A  first  wave  of  aero- 
planes would  have  dropped  on  the  city  roofs  tons 
of  small  bombs  which  released  burning  phosphorus 
— ^that  flame  cannot  be  extinguished  by  water.  It 
would  have  started  a  conflagration  against  which  the 
Fire  Department  would  have  been  almost  powerless, 
in  a  hundred  quarters  of  the  city.  Into  the  light  fur- 
nished by  this  general  fire,  the  Germans  proposed 
to  send  second  and  third  waves  of  aeroplanes  loaded 
with  the  heaviest  bombs;  they  could  pick  their  ob- 
jectives in  the  vital  parts  of  the  city  as  they  could 
not  during  an  ordinary  moonlight  raid.  From  that 
the  gas-bombardment  would  have  been  but  a  step.  I 
have  shown  what  we  might  have  done  to  Berlin  in 
19 19  with  giant  bombs  carrying  Lewisite  gas.  The 
Allies,  I  can  testify  personally,  did  not  intend  to  use 
this  method  "unless  they  had  to."  But  the  elimi- 
nation of  civilians  by  the  hundreds  of  thousands, 
perhaps  by  the  millions,  through  gas  bombardments, 
was  a  possibility  had  the  war  continued  until  1920. 
In  "the  next  war,"  this  gas-bombardment  of  cap- 
itals and  great  towns  is  not  only  a  possibility  but 
a  strong  probability — almost  a  certainty.     Military 


46  THE  NEXT  WAR 

staffs  have  had  time  to  think,  to  carry  out  the  changes 
and  discoveries  of  the  Great  War  to  their  logical 
conclusion.  They  see  that  even  with  the  known 
gases,  the  existing  aeroplanes,  Paris,  Rome  or 
London  could  in  one  night  be  changed  from  a  me- 
tropolis to  a  necroplis.  If  any  military  man  hesi- 
tates to  apply  this  method — and  being  human  and 
having  a  professional  dislike  of  killing  civilians,  he 
must  hesitate — the  thought  of  what  the  enemy  might 
do  drives  him  on  to  consideration  of  this  plan  of 
warfare,  and  to  preparation.  There  are  at  this 
moment  at  least  two  elements  in  the  world  quite 
capable  of  turning  this  trick  had  they  the  means  and 
control.  The  method  is  so  effective  that  if  you  do 
not  use  it,  some  one  else  will.  You  must  be  pre- 
pared to  counter,  to  reply  in  kind. 

Here  are  the  words  of  a  few  authorities : 

Brigadier  General  Mitchell  of  the  United  States 
Army,  pleading  with  the  House  Committee  on  ap- 
propriations for  more  defensive  aeroplanes,  said 
that  "a  few  planes  could  visit  New  York  as  the  cen- 
tral point  of  a  territory  lOO  miles  square  every  eight 
days  and  drop  enough  gas  to  keep  the  entire  area 
inundated  .  .  .  200  tons  of  phosgene  gas  could  be 
laid  every  eight  days  and  would  be  enough  to  kill 
every  inhabitant." 

Captain  Bradner,  Chief  of  Research  of  the 
Chemical  Warfare  Service,  said  at  a  Congressional 
hearing: 

"One  plane  carrying  two  tons  of  the  liquid  [a 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        47 

certain  gas-generating  compound]  could  cover  an 
area  of  100  feet  wide  and  7  miles  long,  and  could 
deposit  enough  material  to  kill  every  man  in  that 
area  by  action  on  his  skin.  It  would  be  entirely  pos- 
sible for  this  country  to  manufacture  several  thou- 
sand tons  a  day,  provided  the  necessary  plants  had 
been  built.  If  Germany  had  had  4,000  tons  of  this 
material  and  300  or  400  planes  equipped  In  this  way 
for  its  distribution,  the  entire  first  American  army 
would  have  been  annihilated  in  10  or  12  hours." 

Brevet  Colonel  J.  F.  C.  Fuller  this  year  won  In 
England  the  Gold  Medal  of  the  Royal  United 
Service  Institution  for  his  essay  on  the  warfare  of 
the  future.  All  through,  he  avoids  this  topic  of 
attacks  on  the  civilian  population;  he  Is  treating, 
like  a  true  old-time  military  man,  of  armies  alone. 
But  Fuller  says  concerning  the  general  possibilities 
of  gas,  which  he  believes  to  be  the  weapon  of  the 
future:  "It  is  quite  conceivable  that  many  gases 
may  be  discovered  which  will  penetrate  all  known 
gas  armor.  As  there  is  no  reason  why  one  man 
should  not  be  able  to  release  100  cylinders  simul- 
taneously, there  is  no  reason  why  he  should  not  re- 
lease several  million;  in  fact,  these  might  be  released 
in  England  today  electrically  by  a  one-armed  cripple 
sitting  In  Kamchatka  directly  his  indicator  denoted 
a  favorable  wind." 

And  Major-General  E.  D.  Swinton,  of  the  Brit- 
ish army,  said  In  discussing  Colonel  Fuller's  paper: 

"It  has  been  rather  our  tendency  up  to  the  pres- 


48  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ent  to  look  upon  warfare  from  the  retail  point  of 
view — of  killing  men  by  fifties  or  hundreds  or  thou- 
sands. But  when  you  speak  of  gas  .  .  .  you  must 
remember  that  you  are  discussing  a  weapon  which 
must  be  considered  from  the  wholesale  point  of  view 
and  if  you  use  it — and  I  do  not  know  of  any  reason 
why  you  should  not — you  may  kill  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  men,  or  at  any  rate  disable  them." 

Here,  perhaps,  is  the  place  to  say  that  Lewisite 
and  the  gas  beyond  Lewisite  are  probably  no  longer 
the  exclusive  secret  of  the  United  States  Govern- 
ment. We  had  allies  in  this  war;  doubtless  they 
learned  the  formula.  Even  if  not;  once  science  knows 
that  a  formula  exists,  its  rediscovery  is  only  a  mat- 
ter of  patient  research,  not  of  genius.  And  gas- 
investigation  is  quietly  going  on  abroad.  If  they 
have  not  arrived  at  the  same  substances,  the  chemists 
of  Europe  have  worked  out  others  just  as  deadly. 
The  scientific  investigation  of  the  killing  possibilities 
in  gas  is  only  four  years  old. 

Colonel  Fuller  says  bluntly  in  his  illuminating 
essay  that  the  armies  which  entered  the  late  war 
were  antiquated  human  machines,  that  military 
brains  had  ossified.  Warfare,  he  says,  must  be,  will 
be,  brought  up  to  the  standard  of  civilian  technique. 
Henceforth,  general  staffs  must  not  wait  for  un- 
stimulated civilians  to  invent  new  machines  or  meth- 
ods of  attack  and  defence.  They  must  mobilize  high 
technicians  and  inventors  in  the  "pause  between 
wars"   as  well  as  in  war,  bend  all  their  energies 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        49 

toward  discovering  new  ways  of  killing.  And  vir- 
tually, that  improvement  in  warfare  is  already  be- 
gun. In  the  laboratories  of  Europe, — just  as  the 
farseeing  prophesied  after  Second  Ypres — men  are 
studying  new  ways  to  destroy  life. 

Scientific  discovery  involves  the  factors  of  leisure. 
To  reach  great  things,  a  man  cannot  be  hurried. 
War  is  all  organized  hurry.  With  both  sides  rac- 
ing for  victory,  the  savants  of  Europe  had  not  the 
leisure  to  reach  out  toward  the  unknown.  They 
worked  with  poison  gas;  that  was  already  discov- 
ered, and  merely  needed  improvement.  Now,  in  the 
pause  since  the  Armistice,  they  are  venturing  into 
the  unknown.  Let  us  take  testimony  again  from 
the  public  and  official  remarks  of  General  Swinton: 

".  .  .  ray  warfare.  I  imagine  from  the  progress 
that  has  been  made  in  the  past  that  in  the  future 
we  will  not  have  recourse  to  gas  al'one,  but  will  em- 
ploy every  force  of  nature  that  we  can;  and  there 
is  a  tendency  at  present  for  progress  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  different  forms  of  rays  that  can  be  turned 
to  lethal  purposes.  W'e  tiave  X-rays,  we  have  light 
rays,  we  have  heat  rays.  .  .  .  We  may  not  be  so 
ver^'  far  from  the  development  of  some  kinds  of 
lethal  ray  w'hich  will  shrivel  up  or  paralyze  or  poison 
human  beings  .  .  .  The  final  form  of  human  strife, 
as  I  regard  it,  is  germ  warfare.  I  think  it  will  come 
to  that;  and  so  far  as  I  can  see  there  is  no  reason 
why  it  should  not,  if  you  mean  to  fight.  .  .  .  pre- 
pare now  ...  we  must  envisage  these  new  forms  of 


so  THE  NEXT  WAR 

warfare,  and  as  far  as  possible  expend  energy,  time 
and  money  in  encouraging  our  inventors  and  sci- 
entists to  study  the  waging  of  war  on  a  wholesale 
scale  instead  of  .  .  .  thinking  so  much  about  meth- 
ods which  will  kill  a  few  individuals  only  at  a  time." 

In  the  war  just  finished, — according  to  neutral 
and  scientifically  dispassionate  Danish  historians — 
nearly  ten  million  soldiers  died  in  battle  or  of 
wounds;  probably  two  or  three  million  soldiers  were 
permanently  disabled.  Yet  we  were  killing  only  by 
retail,  where  in  "the  next  war"  we  shall  kill  by 
wholesale. 

The  same  late  war,  according  to  those  same  Dan- 
ish statisticians,  cost  thirty  million  more  human  be- 
ings— ^mere  civilians — "who  might  be  living  today." 
Yet  taking  Armageddon  by  and  large,  the  weapons 
were  deli-berately  turned  against  civilians  with  com- 
parative  infrequency.  Declining  birth  rates  account 
for  a  part  of  those  thirty  millions.  The  rest,  for 
the  most  part  diied  of  the  "accidents,"  of  such  war- 
fare as  we  waged.  If  we  except  the  Armenian  mas- 
sacres, we  find  that  only  a  small  fraction  of  the  total 
went  to  their  graves  through  attacks  aimed  directly 
at  their  lives — as  in  the  atrocities  of  the  Hungarians 
against  the  Serbs,  the  Russians  against  the  East 
Prussians,  the  Germans  against  the  Belgians;  or  in 
attacks  aimed  indirectly  at  their  lives — as  in  the 
submarine  sinkings  and  air  raids.  Most  of  them 
died  just  because  they  were  in  the  way  of  war — 
died  of  malnutrition  in  the  blockaded  countries,  of 


Esbimd-ted  Loss  of  Soldier  Lives 
in  Decent  Wars.. 


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TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR         53 

starvation  and  exposure  in  the  great  treks  away 
from  invading  armies.  But  now  we  are  to  have 
killing  by  wholesale  instead  of  retail;  and  killing, 
unless  I  miss  my  guess,  aimed  directly  at  civilian 
populations. 

So  much  for  civilian  lives  in  "the  next  war."  What 
about  soldier  lives,  when  we  come  to  kill  by  whole- 
sale instead  of  by  retail?  The  answer  involves  a 
discussion  of  military  weapons,  tactics  and  strategy 
in  "the  next  war." 

I  have  not  yet  discussed  the  tank.  Britain  con- 
tributed that  improvement,  as  Germany  contributed 
gas.  It  involved  the  combination  of  one  device  al- 
most as  old  as  warfare — armor — with  two  devices 
borrowed  from  the  arts  of  peace — the  gasolene 
engine  and  the  caterpillar  wheel.  It  was  an  instru- 
ment of  the  offensive  in  that  it  gave  men  and  guns 
greater  mobility;  it  was  defensive  in  that  it  pro- 
tected soldiers  and  their  weapons  as  they  advanced 
into  the  enemy's  territory.  The  British  employed 
their  tanks,  as  the  Germans  their  gas,  timidly  and 
experimentally  in  the  beginning.  The  wholesale 
use  of  tanks  at  the  Somme  in  19 16  would  have  won 
the  war.  The  munition  makers,  in  the  two  years 
between  the  Somme  and  the  Armistice,  somewhat 
improved  this  new  weapon.  The  early  types  could 
advance  only  four  or  five  miles  an  hour  over  ordinary 
rough  ground — just  the  pace  of  a  man  at  a  brisk 
walk.  The  improved  types  could  make  ten  or  twelve 
miles  an  hour — practically,  the  speed  of  cavalry  in 


54  THE  NEXT  WAR 

action.  The  tanks  of  the  Somme  carried  merely 
machine-guns.  Many  of  those  used  in  the  Battle 
of  Liberation  were  armed  with  standard-calibre  field- 
guns.  Practically,  there  is  no  limit  to  the  possible 
size  of  tanks.  Munitions  designers  are  preparing  to 
build  them  bigger  and  bigger,  just  as  naval  designers 
have  built  warships  bigger  and  bigger — from  two 
hundred-ton  caravels  which  fought  the  Armada  to 
the  20,000-ton  dreadnought.  The  "land  battleship" 
will  doubtless  grow  in  bulk  until  expense  sets  a  limit. 
And  now,  military  experts  are  considering  a  new 
possibility  of  tanks.  If  a  submarine  warship  may  be 
rendered  water-tight,  so  may  a  tank  be  rendered 
gas-tight. 

Poison  gas,  as  I  have  repeated  even  to  weariness, 
seems  to  be  the  killing  weapon  of  the  future.  How- 
ever, the  explosive  shell  is  by  no  means  out  of  date. 
It  merely  becomes  more  or  less  of  an  auxiliary  to 
gas.  Gas  cannot  batter  down  intrenchments  and 
fortifications,  destroy  buildings,  puncture  masks  or 
air-proof  tanks  and  fortresses.  The  explosive  shell 
will  still  blast  the  way;  the  gas  will  for  the  most 
part  do  the  actual  job  of  killing.  Explosive-project- 
ing artillery  will  either  be  encased  in  tanks  or,  when 
it  takes  the  open,  generally  mounted  on  the  cater- 
pillar wheel,  which  gives  it  far  greater  mobility,  even 
over  rough  country,  than  the  swiftest  horse-drawn 
artillery.  Designers  of  tanks  and  modern  gun-car- 
riages are  of  course  studying  to  increase  their  speed. 
We  may  reasonably  expect  that  even  the  heavy  artil- 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR         55 

lery  will  be  able,  by  "the  next  war,"  to  go  twenty 
or  twenty-five  miles  an  hour.  Hitherto,  armies  have 
needed  roads  in  order  to  advance.  But  the  caterpil- 
lar wheel  makes  artillery  comparatively  independent 
of  highways. 

These,  then,  will  probably  be  the  tactics  of  the 
next  war  on  land,  provided  that  we  make  no  great 
basic  discovery  in  the  art  of  killing,  but  only  improve 
up  to  their  best  possibilities  the  instruments  we  have 
and  know.  The  better  to  imagine  the  scene,  let  us 
repeat  the  situation  of  the  last  war,  and  imagine  a 
thoroughly-prepared  Germany  attacking  and  trying 
to  invade  a  thoroughly^prepared  France. 

The  attackers  will  probably  dispense  with  a  dec- 
laration of  hostilities,  following  the  precedent  estab- 
lished by  the  Japanese  in  their  war  against  Russia. 
"Wars  will  no  longer  be  declared,"  says  the  Colonel 
Fuller  so  often  quoted  above,  "but  like  a  tropical 
tornado  there  will  be  a  darkening  of  the  sky,  and 
then  the  flood.  To  dally  over  the  declaration  will 
be  considered  as  foolish  as  a  Fontenoy  courtesy — a 
wave  of  a  plumed  hat — 'Gentlemen  of  France,  fire 
first!'"  Germany  will  start  from  her  frontier  an 
army  of  tanks,  big  and  little,  gas-proof,  their  guns 
provided  with  gas  shells  to  kill,  with  explosive  shells 
to  open  the  way  for  killing.  They  will  be  backed  by 
the  heavy  artillery  on  caterpillar  trucks.  The  French 
will  probably  have  a  defence  ready  for  this  form 
of  attack.  Across  their  frontiers  will  stretch  a  line 
of  retorts  capable  of  setting  up  a  lethal  cloud  four 


56  THE  NEXT  WAR 

hundred  miles  long — "from  Switzerland  to  the  sea.'* 
At  the  burst  of  hostilities,  the  French  will  loosen  this 
defence;  if  it  works  perfectly,  they  will  have  leisure 
to  mobilize.  The  Germans  may  elect  to  advance 
their  force  of  gas-proof  tanks  through  this  cloud; 
they  may  wait  for  it  to  dissipate;  they  may  have 
means  to  drive  "alleys  of  immunity"  through  it,  and 
so  permit  the  passage  of  their  forces.  What  method 
they  try  depends  largely  on  the  future  of  infantry; 
and  that  is  still  a  moot  point. 

Certain  optimistic  soldiers  have  registered  the 
belief  that  the  dense  masses  of  infantry,  which  have 
been  the  backbone  of  all  previous  modern  wars,  will 
disappear  from  the  new  warfare.  Tanks,  the  cavalry 
of  the  future,  will  win  and  lose  battles.  It  will  be 
impossible  for  any  nation  to  manufacture  enough 
tanks  to  contain  its  whole  mobilizable  force;  there  is 
not  so  much  steel-making  capacity  in  the  world. 
Therefore,  we  shall  come  down  again  to  compara- 
tively small  professional  armies  of  experts. 

Most  soldiers  with  whom  I  have  talked  do  not 
endorse  this  view.  They  think  that  nothing  will 
ever  wholly  displace  infantry.  Artillery  was  king 
of  battles  in  the  late  war;  all  national  resources  were 
bent  toward  making  guns  and  still  more  guns,  shells 
and  still  more  shells.  Yet  the  masses  of  infantry  re- 
mained; the  General  Staffs  were  shrieking  not  only 
for  more  guns,  but  for  more  men.  You  wage  war 
to  occupy  positions  and  territory;  nothing  can  finally 
seize   and   hold   positions   and  territory  but  great 


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TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        57 

bodies  of  armed  men.  These  soldiers  to  whom  I 
have  talked  believe  that  this  old,  basic  rule  of  war- 
fare will  not  change  in  the  next  war,  any  more  than 
it  changed  in  the  late  war.  The  -infantryman  may, 
however,  abandon  his  rifle,  and  carry  instead  the 
shorter-ranged  but  far  more  deadly  gas-grenade — 
though  even  the  passing  of  the  rifle,  in  its  multiplied 
form  of  the  machine-gun,  seems  doubtful. 

There  is  some  question  whether  these  masses  of 
infantry  will  come  directly  to  grips  with  each  other. 
But  that  does  not  mean  that  they  will  not  be  killed 
"by  wholesale,  not  by  retail,"  They  may  be  held 
back  until  the  machines  of  war  have  stamped  out 
resistance,  and  then  brought  up  merely  to  hold  the 
territory;  but  they  will  be  constantly  under  attack 
from  the  air. 

For  even  before  the  tank-army  starts  toward  that 
belt  of  lethal  mist  which  marks  the  frontier,  the  air- 
fleets  will  be  on  their  way.  I  have  shown  how  un- 
manned aeroplanes  may  be  directed  by  wireless,  and 
so  become  projectiles  of  unimagined  range  and 
cali^bre.  Such  fleets,  and  other  aircraft  armed  with 
machine-guns,  high  explosive  bombs,  gas-bombs,  will 
search  out  the  masses  of  waiting  infantry.  The  de- 
fenders will  fight  these  fleets  with  their  own  aero- 
planes; while  the  tanks  are  waging  war  on  solid 
land,  the  aircraft  will  be  engaged  in  a  wholesale 
version  of  the  retail  air-holocausts  which  we  knew 
in  the  late  war.  Whenever  squadrons  of  these  at- 
tacking aeroplanes  get  through  to   their  objective, 


58  THE  NEXT  WAR 

whether  bodies  of  soldiers  or  towns,  they  may  make 
even  the  slaughter  of  Verdun  seem  by  comparison 
like  bow-and-arrow  warfare. 

Such  a  war,  probably,  would  not  last  long.  That 
is  not  a  certainty,  however.  One  can  imagine  a 
drawn  first  attack;  a  situation  where  after  incredible 
slaughter  and  destruction  on  both  sides,  the  bel- 
ligerents would  settle  down  to  a  war  of  gas  on  the 
frontiers  and  of  aeroplane  raids  on  the  towns,  while 
each  side  strove  to  manufacture  enough  munitions 
for  a  decisive  victory.  However,  even  a  war  of  a 
few  weeks  or  months  would  be  enough.  It  would 
probably  roll  up  at  least  as  large  a  score  of  killed 
and  maimed  soldiers,  of  property  destruction,  as  the 
late  war  of  unblessed  memory.  It  would  probably 
kill  many  more  civilians. 

What  of  the  defence — less  importantly  against 
air-bombs  loaded  with  tons  of  explosive,  more  im- 
portantly against  poison  gas?  Now,  you  must  de- 
fend not  only  armies  but  citizens  of  towns,  not  only 
soldiers  but  the  weakest  girl  baby.  Usually,  when  a 
new  weapon  is  introduced  into  warfare,  some  time 
passes  before  men  invent  an  adequate  defence.  The 
knife,  carried  in  the  hand  or  mounted  on  a  shaft, 
dates  from  prehistoric  times;  we  were  well  ad- 
vanced into  historic  times  before  body  armor  became 
good  enough  to  turn  the  edge  of  a  knife.  The  best 
defence  against  gun-fire — burrowing  in  the  earth — 
though  long  known,  was  not  fully  worked  out  and 
universally  applied  until  the  late  war.     The  mask 


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TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR         59 

formed  a  pretty  good  defence  against  the  first  poison 
gases;  its  difficulties  and  imperfections  I  have  men- 
tioned before.  But  the  German  mustard  gas,  the 
American  Lewisite  gas,  attacks  the  skin,  the  one 
producing  bad  burns,  the  other  fatally  poisoning  the 
system.  To  protect  the  individual  against  such  at- 
tack there  are  envisaged  at  present  two  methods. 
The  skin  of  the  whole  body  may  be  greased  with  an 
ointment  containing  an  antidote  for  the  poison.  The 
British  were  preparing,  when  the  Armistice  came, 
to  adopt  this  defence  for  their  armies  against  Ger- 
man mustard  gas.  But  this  was  recognized  as  an 
imperfect  defence.  After  your  greased  troops  have 
for  a  few  hours  wallowed  in  the  trenches  or  en- 
dured a  rainstorm  on  the  march,  the  ointment  is 
rubbed  off  or  washed  off  in  patches.  Better,  if  it 
could  be  done,  would  be  a  protective,  chemically- 
treated  suit  with  gloves  and  headpiece,  perfectly 
fitting  to  the  mask — in  other  words,  a  mask  extended 
to  cover  the  whole  body.  This  may  be  tried,  for 
armies.  After  all,  they  must  have  uniforms.  Finally 
comes  the  method  of  sending  the  advanced  forces  to 
action  enclosed  in  gas-proof  tanks. 

But  when  you  consider  these  methods  of  defence 
for  civilian  populations,  you  encounter  special  diffi- 
culties. In  the  next  European  war,  shall  we  have  all 
the  inhabitants  of  Paris  living  in  a  coating  of  pro- 
tective ointment,  the  mask  ready  to  hand?  Every 
line  officer  knows  how  hard  it  was  to  make  disci- 
plined soldiers  keep  on  their  masks  in  time  of  danger. 


6o  THE  NEXT  WAR 

To  make  civilians  keep  themselves  greased,  to  make 
them  assume  their  masks  promptly  and  intelligently 
in  the  event  of  a  general  killing  raid  over  London 
or  Paris,  we  should  have  to  render  universal  mili- 
tary training  really  universal,  and  begin  it  not  in 
the  schools  but  in  the  cradle.  The  same  objection — 
with  expense  in  addition — would  apply  to  the  pro- 
vision of  *'anti-gas"  suits  for  all  civilians  in  the  great 
cities. 

The  gas-proof  tank,  a  military  improvement  now 
virtually  accomplished,  points  the  way  to  the  per- 
fect defence.  Colonel  Fuller  imagines  "centres  of 
defence" — fortresses,  or  something  like  them,  ren- 
dered gas-tight,  wherein  you  may  keep  your  reserve 
forces,  to  which  your  tanks  will  return  for  repairs 
and  replenishment  of  supplies.  We  can  reconstruct 
our  great  cities  so  as  to  furnish  for  our  civilians  "cen- 
tres of  defence."  That  was  done  imperfectly  in  the 
late  war,  when  in  constantly-raided  towns  such  as 
Venice  the  authorities  banked  the  deep  cellars  with 
sandbags,  thus  turning  them  into  dug-outs  like  those 
used  by  the  troops.  However,  cellars  will  never  form 
a  defence  against  sinking,  lethal,  cell-killing  gas  like 
Lewisite  and  its  probable  successors.  The  shelters 
must  be  large  enough  to  accommodate  the  people  of 
a  whole  city;  they  must  be  deep  enough  in  the  ground 
to  resist  the  enormous  explosive  power  of  the  great, 
new  bombs;  they  must  be  gas-proofed,  either  by 
rendering  them  air-tight  and  furnishing  oxygen  to 
keep  the  inmates  alive,  or  by  providing  ventilators 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        6l 

which  make  the  outer  air  pass  through  an  antidote. 
They  must  be  as  easily  accessible  as  a  subway — even 
more  accessible.  This  virtually  involves  rebuilding 
modern  cities,  if  the  inhabitants  expect  to  survive 
a  war.    It  is  absurd,  of  course. 

Unless  some  General  Staff  in  Europe  is  hugging  a 
deep  and  sinister  secret,  we  have  not  yet  found  the 
killing  ray.  That  lies  beyond  the  present  frontiers 
of  science;  its  discovery  involves  pioneer  work.  If 
it  comes,  it  may  change  and  intensify  warfare  in 
many  ways  which  we  cannot  at  present  conceive. 
But  warfare  by  disease-bearing  bacilli  is  already  pre- 
paring in  the  laboratories.  Here,  for  example,  is 
one  method  which  I  have  heard  suggested  and  which, 
I  learn  from  men  of  science,  seems  quite  possible: 
Find  some  rather  rare  disease,  preferably  one  which 
flourishes  in  a  far  corner  of  the  world,  so  that  peo- 
ple of  your  own  region  have  no  natural  immunity 
against  it,  just  as  the  American  Indians  have  no 
immunity  against  measles.  Experiment  until  you 
find  a  good,  practical  serum  which  may  be  manu- 
factured on  a  wholesale  scale.  Cultivate  the  bacilli 
until  they  are  strengthened  to  that  malignant  stage 
with  which  the  recent  influenza  epidemic  made  us 
familiar — that  can  be  done  with  some  species  of 
bacilli.  Innoculate  your  own  army;  if  necessary  your 
own  civilian  population.  Then  by  night-flying  aero- 
planes, by  spies,  by  infected  insects,  vermin  or  water, 
by  any  other  means  which  ingenuity  may  suggest, 
scatter  the  germs  among  the  enemy  forces.     In  a 


62  THE  NEXT  WAR 

few  days,  you  will  have  a  sick  enemy,  easily  con- 
quered. It  takes  time  to  discover  a  specific  or  a 
serum  for  a  new  disease.  The  mischief  would  be 
done  long  before  the  laboratories  of  the  enemy  could 
find  a  defence  for  this  especially  romantic  and  valor- 
ous form  of  battle.  As  germ  warfare  is  at  present 
conceived,  it  would  be  directed  against  armies  alone. 
But  any  one  who  followed  the  late  war  knows  what 
human  chains  bind  the  troops  in  the  trenches  to  the 
general  population.  With  almost  every  one  min- 
istering in  some  capacity  to  the  army,  soldiers  and 
civilians  are  inextricably  mixed.  Armies  simply  could 
not  be  quarantined.  Among  the  possibilities  of  the 
next  war  is  a  general,  blighting  epidemic,  like  the 
Black  Plagues  of  the  Middle  Ages — a  sudden,  mys- 
terious, undiscriminating  rush  of  death  from  which 
a  man  can  save  himself  only  by  fleeing  his  fellow 
man. 

Then — there  are  easily  cultivated,  easily  spread, 
diseases  of  plants.  What  about  a  rust  which  will 
ruin  your  enemy's  grain  crop  and  starve  him  out? 
That  method  of  warfare  has  been  suggested  and  is 
now  being  investigated. 

So  much  for  the  direct  effect  of  the  next  land  war 
upon  human  life,  and  especially  upon  civilian  life. 
Before  I  leave  the  subject,  however,  I  must  go  into 
naval  operations,  of  which  I  have  hitherto  omitted 
mention.    The  submarine,  in  the  hands  of  the  Ger- 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        63 

mans,  proved  its  distinct  value.  Many  naval  men 
say  that  the  Germans  made  the  same  mistake  with 
their  submarines  that  they  did  with  their  gases, 
and  that  the  British  did  with  their  tanks.  They  did 
not  realize  the  power  in  their  hands.  Had  they  be- 
gun the  war  with  as  many  submarines  as  they  manned 
in  191 7,  had  they  stuck  from  first  to  last  to  their 
policy  of  sinking  without  warning,  they  might  have 
starved  out  England  and  won.  The  submarine  grew 
mightily  in  speed,  in  cruising  radius,  in  offensive 
power.  The  German  U-boats  of  19 14  were  as 
slow  as  a  tub  freighter;  they  could  make  only  sihort 
dashes  from  their  bases;  they  depended  almost  en- 
tirely on  their  torpedoes.  Those  of  19 18  were 
almost  as  fast  on  the  surface  as  an  old-fashioned 
battleship,  they  proved  that  they  could  cross  and  re- 
cross  the  Atlantic  on  their  own  supplies  of  fuel,  they 
mounted  long-range  five-  and  six-inch  guns.  That 
much  greater  improvemicnt  is  possible,  all  naval 
designers  agree.  Certain  naval  architects  hold  that 
virtually  all  warships  of  the  future  will  be  capable 
of  diving  and  traveling  concealed  under  water — 
the  submersible  dreadnought.  I  shall  not  go  into 
the  present  controversy  between  the  experts  who 
would  stick  to  the  surface  dreadnought  and  those 
who  believe  in  scrapping  fleets  and  designing  only 
submerslbles.  I,  the  landman,  will  not  presume  to 
judge  between  nautical  experts.  But  I  notice  that 
those  who  adhere  to  the  theory  of  surface  fleets 


»» 


64  THE  NEXT  WAR 

qualify  their  statements  with — "for  the  present. 
They  seem  to  believe  that  it  will  come  to  submarines 
or  submersibles  in  the  end. 

We  ail  know  from  the  expression  of  the  late  war 
how  perfectly  the  ocean  protects  submarines.  Ger- 
mans have  told  me  since  the  Armistice  that  at  no 
time  did  the  Imperial  Navy  have  more  than  fifty 
of  these  craft  cruising  at  once;  usually  there  were 
only  about  twenty-five.  Against  them,  the  Allies 
were  using  at  least  half  of  their  naval  resources; 
thousands  of  craft,  from  giant  dreadnoughts  to  swift 
little  chasers,  mobilized  to  fight  imperfectly  less  than 
fifty  of  these  deep-sea  assassins !  You  can  attack 
them  with  other  naval  vessels  only  from  the  surface. 
That  "submarine  cannot  fight  submarine"  is  a  naval 
axiom.  In  the  next  war,  a  few  hundred  submersibles 
of  the  new,  swift,  powerful  type  could  almost  un- 
doubtedly accomplish  what  Germany  failed  to  ac- 
complish in  19 1 7  and  19 18 — establish  an  effective 
food-blockade  of  England  or  of  any  other  region 
dependent  upon  overseas  importation  for  its  bread 
and  meat. 

And  whoev^er  starts  such  a  campaign  will  un- 
questionably heed  the  plea  of  "national  necessity" 
as  did  Germany  in  1 9 1 7-1 9 1 8  :  abrogate  the  old  sea- 
law  which  compelled  attackers  to  warn  ships  about 
to  be  sunk,  and  strike  out  of  the  darkness  and  the  sea- 
depths.    For  the  lid  is  off. 

So  we  may  add  to  the  possible  death-cost  in  the 


TACTICS  OF  THE  NEXT  WAR        65 

next  war  not  only  malnutrition  but  actual  starvation 
"by  wtholesale." 

Remember  those  Danish  statistics.  Ten  million 
soldiers  in  arms  died  in  the  last  war;  and  thirty 
million  others  "who  might  be  living  today"  are  not 
living.  War  on  civihans  was  not  yet  a  generally 
acknowledged  fact;  it  was  only  a  practical  result. 
In  the  next  war,  it  will  be  an  acknowledged  fact.  The 
civilian  population,  I  repeat  once  for  all,  will  be  an 
objective  of  military  necessity — fair  game. 

It  would  not  be,  could  not  be,  if  we  fought  only 
with  the  old,  primitive  weapons,  saw  with  our  own 
eyes  the  effect  of  our  blows.  During  the  invasion 
of  Belgium,  a  friend  of  mine  stood  beside  a  German 
private  playing  with  a  little  Belgian  girl.  "Our  dis- 
cipline is  perfect,"  said  the  officer.  "You  see  that 
soldier.  He  likes  that  child.  He  has  toward  her 
humane  sentiments.  Yet  if  I  ordered  him  to  run 
his  bavonet  through  her,  he  would  obey  without  an 
instant's  hesitation."  Now  personally,  I  doubt  that. 
The  man  in  question  might  have  obeyed;  I  do  not 
believe  that  the  average  German  soldier  would  have 
obeyed — slightly  brutalized  though  he  was  by  "the 
system."  There  were  German  atrocities  in  Belgium 
— I  can  testify  personally  to  that — ^but  they  did  not 
happen  in  that  way.  Contrary  to  a  rumor  widely 
circulated  and  believed  by  many  Americans  as  gos- 
pel, the  Germans  did  not  cut  off  children's  hands. 


66  THE  NEXT  WAR 

But  the  new  warfare  takes  advantage  of  the  limits 
of  human  imagination.  If  you  bayonet  a  child,  you 
see  the  spurt  of  blood,  the  curling  up  of  the  little 
body,  the  look  in  the  eyes.  .  .  .  But  if  you  loose 
a  bomb  on  a  town,  you  see  only  that  you  have  made 
a  fair  hit.  Time  and  again  I  have  dined  with  French 
boy-aviators,  British  boy-aviators,  American  boy- 
aviators,  home  from  raids.  They  were  gallant,  gen- 
erous, kindly  youths.  And  they  were  thinking  and 
talking  not  of  the  effects  of  their  bombs  but  only 
of  "the  hit."  If  now  and  then  a  spurt  of  vision  shot 
into  their  minds,  they  closed  their  imagination — as 
one  must  do  in  war. 


CHAPTER  VI 

WAR  AND   THE    RACE 

So  much  for  civilians.  Now  let  us  turn  our  imagi- 
nations again  upon  those  ten  million  soldiers  dead  in 
the  last  war,  and  the  unestimated  millions  in  the  next. 
Let  us  forget  the  obvious;  let  me  forget  it  who  have 
seen  war — the  gray-green  streak  down  Douaumont 
Ravine  where  lay  tens  of  thousands  of  German  dead, 
the  rib-bones  sticking  everywhere  out  of  Vimy  Ridge, 
the  wave  of  moaning  from  the  three  thousand 
wounded  and  dying  in  the  Casino  Hospital  at 
Boulogne.  Let  us  remember  that  all  men  must  die, 
and  consider  the  thing  cold-bloodedly  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  particular  race  which  draws  the 
sword,  and  of  the  whole  human  species.  We  shall 
find,  then,  that  the  chief  loss  of  the  late  war  was 
not  the  hundreds  of  billions  of  dollars  of  property 
value  destroyed,  nor  yet  the  thirty  million  civilians 
"who  might  be  living  today,"  but  the  ten  million  sol- 
diers. 

From  the  pacifist  literature  which  preceded  our 
entrance  into  the  European  War,  three  books  stand 
out  in  memory.  Jean  Bloch,  a  Pole,  maintained  that 
war  could  not  be;  the  horrors  of  modern  warfare 


68  THE  NEXT  WAR 

were  so  great  that  men  would  not  long  face  them. 
Events  discredited  Bloch;  we  found  unexpected  res- 
ervoirs of  valor  in  the  human  spirit.  Every  week, 
along  the  great  line,  bodies  of  men  performed  acts 
of  sacrifice  which  made  Thermopylae,  the  Alamo  and 
the  Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade  seem  poor  and 
spiritless.  Normal  Angell,  writing  from  the  eco- 
nomic viewpoint,  predicted  not  that  war  could  not 
be,  but  that  it  would  not  pay;  the  victor  would  lose 
as  well  as  the  vanquished.  Events  so  far  have  tended 
to  vindicate  Norman  Angell's  view;  perhaps  the 
next  ten  years  may  vindicate  him  entirely.  The  third 
work,  less  known  than  the  others,  came  out  of 
Armageddon  unshaken.  It  is  Dr.  David  Starr  Jor- 
dan's "War  and  the  Breed." 

Jordan  is  an  evolutionist,  and  looks  at  all  society 
from  the  viewpoint  of  the  so-called  Darwinian  the- 
ory. The  reader  may  belong  to  a  sect  or  a  scientific 
creed  which  rejects  evolution.  But  he  need  not  be  a 
Darwinian  to  accept  Jordan's  argument.  He  need 
only  believe — I  assume  every  one  does — that  the 
characteristics  of  ancestors  are  transmitted  to  their 
offspring,  that  strong  men  and  women  breed  strong 
descendants,  that  weak  men  and  women  breed  weak 
descendants.  And  Jordan  maintained  that  a  gen- 
eral war,  fought  by  conscript  armies  under  modern 
conditions,  would  set  back  the  quality  of  races  for 
centuries — that  it  would  be  a  gigantic  accomplish- 
ment in  reverse  breeding. 

This  is  how  it  works :  if  you  are  a  grower  of  live- 


WAR  AND  THE  RACE  69 

stock,  trying  to  produce  the  champion  horse  or  cow, 
you  select  from  your  colts  or  calves  the  finest  speci- 
mens, and  breed  them;  the  others  you  slaughter  or 
sterilize.  The  average  cow  new-caught  by  the  bar- 
barians from  the  wild  herds  of  the  European  steppes 
probably  gave  only  a  gallon  or  so  of  milk  a  day.  We 
have  cows  which  give  their  dozen  gallons  of  milk  a 
day;  and  they  have  been  evolved  from  the  wild 
steppe-cow  by  nothing  else  than  this  long  process  of 
selective  breeding.  Now  if  it  were  an  object  to  do 
so,  breeders  could  take  their  herds  of  big,  strong, 
twelve-gallon  Holsteins  and  breed  them  back  to  the 
scrubby  little  one-gallon-cow.  They  need  simply  to 
reverse  the  process — make  it  impossible  for  the  fine 
specimens  to  breed,  and  produce  their  calves,  gen- 
eration after  generation,  from  the  scrubs. 

Modern  war — conscription  plus  increased  killing 
power — does  exactly  this  with  the  males  of  the  hu- 
man species.  You  introduce  universal  service.  Every 
young  man,  usually  at  the  age  of  twenty,  is  drafted 
into  the  standing  army  for  a  service  of  two  or  three 
years.  Gathered  in  the  barracks,  these  conscripts 
are  examined.  Those  not  fit  for  military  service, 
on  mental  and  physical  tests,  are  thrown  out — in 
other  words,  the  deformed,  the  half-witted  or  under- 
brained,  the  narrow-chested,  the  abnormally  weak- 
muscled,  the  tuberculous — the  culls  of  the  breed. 
These  culls  are  free  to  go  their  way,  to  marry  if 
they  wish,  to  become  fathers.  The  rest  are  generally 
forbidden  to  marry  until  they  have  performed  their 


70  THE  NEXT  WAR 

term  of  "first  line"  military  service.  Scientifically 
these  men  are  selected  as  the  flower  of  the  nation. 
The  term  of  first-line  service  completed,  the  young 
man  at  the  age  of  twenty-two  or  twenty-three  goes 
into  the  first  reserve.  He  must  take  part  annuallv 
in  certain  manoeuvers;  otherwise  he  is  free  to  work 
and  to  marry.  At  the  age  of  twenty-six,  twenty- 
eight  or  thereabouts,  he  is  passed  on  to  the  second 
reserve.  At  about  thirty-five,  he  becomes  a  "terri- 
torial" and  remains  in  that  classification  until  he  is 
about  forty-five,  when  his  military  duty  is  supposed 
to  be  done. 

"Fighting  age  is  athletic  age,"  say  British  sol- 
diers. I  do  not  have  to  tell  Americans,  a  sporting 
people,  that  the  best  days  of  the  average  athlete, 
especially  in  sports  like  boxing  or  football  which 
require  intense  effort  and  physical  courage,  come  in 
the  early  twenties.  Those  first-line  troops  are  the 
best  troops. 

Moreover,  they  are  under  arms  when  war  breaks; 
they  do  not  have  to  be  gathered  together,  redrilled 
and  redisciplined.  So  they  go  first  into  battle;  lead 
all  the  early  attacks;  form  generally  the  advanced 
forces  all  through.  The  second  line,  almost  equally 
valuable,  almost  as  much  used,  consists  of  men  in 
the  first  reserve;  and  so  on,  until  we  get  down  to 
the  territorials,  the  men  between  their  late  thirties 
and  their  middle  forties.  Theoretically,  these  "old" 
men  are  not  supposed  to  get  into  action  at  all  ex- 
cept  when  the   necessity   grows   desperate.     They 


WAR  AND  THE  RACE  71 

guard  roads  and  bridges,  dig  reserve  trenches,  garri- 
son captured  territory,  perform  the  hundred  and 
one  varieties  of  labor  which  an  army  requires  behind 
its  line. 

When  all  the  statistics  of  the  war  are  compiled 
and  classified,  their  graphic  chart  will  look  like  a 
pyramid.  They  will  s'how  that  the  losses  bore  by 
far  the  heaviest  on  the  ages  between  twenty  and 
twenty-five;  they  shaded  off  until  in  the  ages  between 
forty  and  forty-nine  they  became  almost  negligible.  * 

Here  is  reverse  breeding  on  a  wholesale,  intensive 
scale.  The  young,  unmarried  men  go  first  to  be 
killed;  are  most  numerously  killed  through  the  whole 
war.  They  are  the  select  stock  of  their  generation; 
and  practically,  not  one  has  fathered  a  child.  Their 
blood  is  wholly  lost  to  the  race.  Next  come  the 
men  in  their  middle  twenties.  Some  of  them  have 
married  since  they  left  the  first  line,  and  some  have 
not.  It  is  doubtful  if  they  average  more  than  one 
child  apiece  when  their  turn  comes  to  die.  So  it 
goes  on,  class  by  class;  smaller  losses  and  more  chil- 
dren, until  we  come  to  the  Territorials  of  forty-five. 
In  that  category,  the  losses  of  life  are  proportion- 
ately very  small,  and  if  we  study  vital  statistics,  we 
find  that  men  of  this  age  have  had  about  all  the 
children  they  are  going  to  have.     But  all  this  time 

*  Forty-five  years  was  the  usual  limit  of  military  service; 
though  for  a  few  months  during  1918,  the  British  stretched  con- 
scription to  fifty.  But  many  French  and  German  Territorials  who 
entered  the  war  aged  forty-five,  were  kept  in  the  army  until  the 
end;  and  were  therefore  forty-nine  in  the  year  of  the  armistice. 


72  THE  NEXT  WAR 

the  culls  of  whatever  age,  the  men  exempted  because 
they  are  below  standard,  are  living  out  their  lives 
and  fathering  children. 

In  our  own  draft,  we  proceeded  on  the  European 
plan,  calling  to  arms  the  men  between  twent}'-one  and 
thirty,  and  generally  exempting  the  married.  That 
age  was  set  largely  to  get  the  men  of  best  fighting 
age — "athletic  age."  But  we  were  moved  by  an- 
other consideration,  which  showed  itself  in  the  ex- 
emption of  married  men.  We  wished  to  minimize 
human  grief  and  human  hardship.  If  an  unmarried 
boy  of  twenty  is  killed  there  are  only  his  immediate 
blood-family  to  mourn  him.  A  married  man  of 
thirty-five  has  in  addition  a  wife  and  children. 
Moreover,  if  he  goes  to  the  war  in  the  ranks,  he  must 
leave  his  wife  and  children  virtually  to  shift  for 
themselves.  Great  Britain  recognized  the  same 
principles  when,  in  her  advance  to  universal  con- 
scription, she  took  the  young  before  the  old,  the 
unmarried  before  the  married. 

Humane  and  beautiful  as  well  as  expedient,  all 
this;  yet  from  the  racial  point  of  view,  unscientific 
even  to  immorality.  Better,  far  better,  would  it  be 
to  begin  at  the  other  end  of  the  scale,  mobihzing  for 
first-line  troops  the  men  between  seventy  and  sixty, 
for  the  second-line  those  between  sixty  and  fifty, 
for  Territorials  those  between  fifty  and  forty-five. 
With  these  old  men  the  race,  as  such,  has  little  con- 
cern. They  have  mostly  fathered  their  children, 
done  their  duty  to  the  strain. 


WAR  AND  THE  RACE  73 

Nature  does  not  care  in  the  least  what  becomes  of 
the  plant  after  It  has  produced  its  seed  and  the  new 
crop  is  growing.  If,  allowing  war,  we  were  con- 
ducting it  scientifically  for  the  best  interests  of  the 
race,  the  slogan  of  conscription  would  be  not  "single 
men  first"  but  "grandfathers  first."  Of  course,  this 
is  ridiculous.  But  it  seems  to  me  that  whenever  we 
carry  out  any  aspect  of  modern  war  to  its  logical 
conclusion,  we  arrive  at  the  ridiculous. 

The  older  wars  of  modern  times  were  not  con- 
ducted by  conscription,  as  we  know  It  now.  The 
rank  and  file,  as  far  as  we  can  read  the  records,  con- 
sisted very  largely  of  the  dregs  of  the  population 
who  had  been  forced  into  the  army  by  press  gangs. 
There  was  a  sprinkling,  however,  of  young,  vigorous 
youths  who  went  to  war  for  the  adventure;  there 
were  organized  bodies  of  soldiers  of  fortune  who 
hired  out  as  mercenaries,  and  who  must  needs  be 
sound  physically.  Occasionally,  too,  we  find  a  body 
of  sturdy  peasantry  like  the  English  yeomen 
who  followed  the  lords  of  the  land  to  war.  There 
was,  however,  no  selective  conscription,  no  careful 
medical  examination  to  reject  the  culls  of  the  blood 
and  send  the  best  to  slaughter,  usually  no  rule  of 
"single  men  first."  Even  at  that,  the  breeding-stock 
killed  In  the  old  wars  was  probably  superior  to  the 
average  level  of  the  race  and  species.  Jordan  be- 
lieves that  he  can  trace  a  kind  of  rhythm  In  the  his- 
tory of  "dominant  nations."  The  war-like  race, 
continuously  engaged  In  battle,  reaches  a  point  where 


74  THE  NEXT  WAR 

it  begins  to  go  decadent,  to  find  its  force  sapped. 
Spain,  lord  of  the  world  up  to  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury, holding  her  power  by  means  of  the  famous 
Spanish  infantry,  "the  wall  which  repaired  its  own 
breaches,"  suddenly  faded  away  until  by  the  nine- 
teenth century  she  was  the  football  of  Europe.  But 
the  off-hand  recruiting  systems  of  those  old  days 
could  not  possibly  hit  the  breed  as  hard  as  our  mod- 
ern method  of  scientific  conscription.  Just  as  techni- 
cally-improved war  has  worked  toward  greater  and 
greater  property-destruction,  so  has  it  worked  to- 
ward greater  and  greater  race-destruction.* 

The  thirty  million  civilians  deprived  of  life  by 
Armageddon  probably  struck  about  the  average 
level  of  the  breed.  Those  who  died  of  starvation 
or  exhaustion  in  the  great  treks  before  the  ad- 
vancing hordes  of  the  late  war  were  below  that 
average.  These  flights  were  primitive  struggles  for 
existence,  wherein  the  weakest  died  first.  Without 
quite  the  same  certainty,  we  may  say  that  those  who 
died  of  malnutrition  and  the  epidemics  directly  en- 
gendered by  war  were  somewhat  below  average. 
TTiat — to  be  perfectly  cold-blooded — was  a  gain 
to  the  race.  But  the  unborn — for  the  most  part 
they  never  came  into  this  world  because  their  po- 

*  Jordan's  militaristic  opponents  asked  once  for  facts  to  support 
his  theory.  This  caused  Dr.  Vernon  Kellogg  to  investigate  the 
old  French  records.  He  found  that  in  the  generation  following 
the  Napoleonic  wars,  the  standard  of  height  and  weight  for  French 
recruits  had  greatly  to  be  lowered  by  the  military  authorities. 
More  significantly,  he  found  the  percentage  of  men  rejected  for 
physical   unfitness  greatly  increased. 


WAR  AND  THE  RACE  75 

tential  fathers  were  away  in  the  trenches  or  dead. 
Those  fathers  were  the  flower  of  Europe,  physi- 
cally and  mentally;  meantime,  the  weaklings,  re- 
jected by  the  recruiting  offices,  remained  at  home, 
breeding  their  vitiated  blood  into  the  strain.  That 
was  a  loss  to  the  race.  Probably  these  items  just 
about  balance  one  another,  and  we  get  in  the  civilian 
losses  an  average  of  the  mental  and  physical 
strength  of  the  European  breed. 

In  the  ten  million  soldiers  lies  the  dead  loss.  Take 
France,  who  suffered  most  heavily  of  all.  She  had 
nearly  a  million  and  three-quarters  men  killed  in 
action,  died  of  wounds  and  "missing  in  action."  But 
that  does  not  tell  the  whole  story.  Of  her  young 
soldiers  between  nineteen  and  thirty-one  years  of 
age,  about  sixty  per  cent  died  in  the  war.  While 
statistics  are  not  yet  compiled  on  this  special  point, 
it  is  doubtful  if  this  glorious  young  company  left 
nearly  so  much  as  an  average  of  one  child  apiece. 
In  the  absolute,  Germany  lost  more  heavily,  in  the 
relative  less  heavily;  she  counts  two  million  killed 
or  missing  in  action  or  dead  of  wounds.  And  if  we 
should  hand  over  the  human  race  to  a  breeder,  to 
improve  by  the  same  methods  he  uses  to  improve  a 
breed  of  horses,  these  are  precisely  the  million  and 
a  half  or  two  millions  whom  he  would  have  chosen 
from  the  men  of  France  and  Germany  for  his  pur- 
pose. 

This  reduction  of  the  strength  in  the  European 
breed  through  the  selective  conscription  system,  plus 


76  THE  NEXT  WAR 

war  by  machinery,  is  one  of  those  situations  which 
one  can  prophesy  in  advance  with  mathematical  ac- 
curacy. The  vital  statistics  of  the  young  and  adoles- 
cent in  the  years  between  191 8  and  1938,  compared 
with  those  between  1894  and  1914,  are  going  to 
prove  the  point  in  cold  figures. 

So  far,  wars  in  general  have  struck  at  the  strength 
of  the  male  strain  alone.  However  much  the  women 
have  been  massacred,  there  has  been  no  scientific 
selection  in  the  choice  of  victims.  The  strength  of 
woman  has  been  left  to  war-depleted  nations  to  re- 
new their  blood.  But  in  the  next  war  we  shall 
probably  do  away  with  that  archaic  check  on  the 
purpose  of  the  great  god  Mars.  Women,  as  I  have 
already  shown,  have  proved  their  value  for  indirect 
military  purposes,  and  so  put  themselves  within  the 
circle  of  destruction.  Already,  the  general  staffs  of 
Europe  are  saying  that  the  recruiting  of  women  in 
the  late  war  was  irregular,  hit-and-miss,  wasteful. 
In  a  struggle  between  national  resources  as  well  as 
national  armies,  it  would  be  far  more  efficient  and 
economical  to  mobilize  them  all  and  select  the  war- 
workers  by  scientific  methods,  according  to  national 
convenience  and  necessity.  All  of  which  is  true  and 
logical.  And  if  women  are  put  under  conscription 
for  munitions  work,  for  ambulance  and  truck  driv- 
ing, for  the  thousand  and  one  varieties  of  light  labor 
which  they  can  perform  in  the  rear  areas  of  an  army 
zone,  we  must  proceed  by  the  same  methods  which 
we   use   in   selective   conscription  of   the   male   ele- 


WAR  AND  THE  RACE  77 

ment.  We  shall,  first  of  all,  spare  the  mothers,  the 
women  who  have  already  given  their  strain  to  the 
breed.  They  are  needed  in  their  homes  for  the 
vital  business  of  rearing  children.  We  shall  take 
the  young  unmarried  women,  and  choose  from  them 
by  scientific  test  the  strongest  and  most  brilliant,  re- 
jecting the  weakest  and  most  stupid.  That  process 
was  begun  in  the  late  war.  The  best  managed  mu- 
nitions works  gave  no  woman  a  job  until  medical  and 
psychological  tests  proved  that  she  had  the  body  and 
brains  for  the  work.  Just  as  with  the  men,  we  shall 
send  the  culls  back  to  civilian  life,  free  to  pour  their 
inferior  blood  into  the  veins  of  the  new  generation. 
In  the  late  war,  a  few  thousands  of  these  superior 
women,  chosen  from  among  the  volunteers  for  muni- 
tions workers  and  for  transport  drivers  in  the  army 
zone,  died  through  air  raids  and  long-distance  artil- 
lery fire.  These  losses  were  not  great  enough  to 
have  much  effect  on  the  breed.  But  they  pointed  the 
way  we  are  going.  In  the  next  war,  with  its  over- 
whelming air  raids,  its  gases  blotting  out  life  over 
square  miles,  its  bacilli,  possibly  its  rays,  munitions 
works  and  the  services  of  the  rear  will  be  special 
objects  of  attack.  There,  as  at  the  front,  we  shall 
kill  by  wholesale  not  by  retail,  and  we  shall  kill  our 
selected  female  breeding  stock.  So  to  the  anti-social 
effects  of  the  next  war  we  must  add  one  never  ac- 
complished before  in  human  history:  the  sapping  of 
the  feminine  strength  in  the  human  race,  as  war — 
even  before  that  great  reversal  of  selective  breed- 


78  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ing  which  was  Armageddon — seems  usually  to  have 
sapped  the  masculine  strength. 

The  extreme  militarist  declares  that  the  highest 
civic  duty  of  man  is  the  advancement  of  the  power 
and  glory  of  his  race  or  nation;  nothing  else  really 
counts.  He  is  confounded  out  of  his  own  mouth.  In 
the  long  story  of  races,  what  doth  it  profit  a  nation 
if  during  two  or  three  generations  she  rules  a  wtorld- 
circling  empire  as  Spain  did  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  and  then  sinks  back  exhausted  and  impotent 
as  Spain  did  In  the  nineteenth?  Does  that  make 
for  the  power  and  glory  of  the  race?  Yet  biologic 
law  seems  to  ordain  that  the  sharp  sword  of  the  war- 
like nation  cuts  both  ways;  and  when  we  intensify 
nature  with  modern  science,  the  matter  gets  beyond 
seeming.  In  the  idea  that  by  war  he  advances  the 
power  and  the  ultimate  glory  of  his  race,  the  mili- 
tarist is  again  mistaking  appearances  for  reality. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE    COST   IN   MONEY 

So  far,  we  have  discussed  mostly  the  direct  effects 
of  war — the  last  and  the  next — on  human  hfe.  The 
loss  of  that  accumulated  wealth  of  the  world  which 
is  property  touches  human  life  indirectly  in  a  thou- 
sand ways,  and  is  therefore  of  more  than  secondary 
importance.  And  here,  we  run  into  bewildering 
perplexities.  What  in  the  arbitrary  terms  of  money 
the  late  war  cost  the  European  peoples,  we  already 
know.  We  know  also  approximately  what  it  cost  in 
out-and-out  destruction  of  houses,  fields,  factories, 
mines  and  railroads  by  bombardment  and  conflagra- 
tion. But  the  shrewdest  economist  cannot  guess  the 
final  cost.  It  is  not  enough  to  compile  the  national 
debt,  so  great  as  to  lie  beyond  the  imagination  of 
the  average  man.  Those  debts  cannot  all  be  paid; 
in  some  manner  or  other,  many  of  them  will  be  re- 
pudiated. The  true  economic  loss,  which  cannot  be 
repudiated,  lies  in  the  disturbance  of  that  delicate 
machine  of  manufacture  and  trade  by  which  modern 
industrial  nations  lived  and  worked  before  the  great 
war.  We  see  that  loss  every  day  in  the  absurd  con- 
ditions of  the  third  year  after  the  Armistice.    There 

79 


8o  THE  NEXT  WAR 

are  three  factors  to  Industrial  production — labor, 
machinery  and  raw  materials.  In  Germany  are  near- 
ly three  million  cotton  operatives,  as  expert  as  any 
in  the  world.  Standing  ready  to  their  hands  is  a  full 
equipment  of  the  most  modern  machinery.  Half  of 
the  cotton  operatives  of  Germany  are  living  in  idle- 
ness and  semi-starvation  for  lack  of  raw  material. 
We  raise  the  raw  material  in  the  South  of  the 
United  States — and  our  southern  farmers  are  in 
financial  difficulties  this  winter  because  they  have  no 
market  for  their  cotton! 

It  was  agreed  in  the  Versailles  treaty  that  Ger- 
many should  furnish  to  France  the  equivalent  of  the 
coal-production  destroyed  when  the  Lille  and  Valen- 
ciennes mines  were  flooded.  Germany  has  nearly 
fulfilled  at  least  that  clause  of  the  treaty.  At  this 
moment  (January,  192 1)  German  coal  in  enormous 
quantities  lies  piled  up  on  sidings  of  France,  unused. 
France  has  the  expert  operatives;  except  in  the  dev- 
astated North,  she  has  her  intact  machinery;  she 
has  a  great  job  of  building  to  do,  and  that  involves 
steel,  which  Is  made  with  coal.  But  she  cannot  use 
that  German  coal  just  now,  because  a  combination 
of  adv^erse  exchange,  undermined  credits  and  shaken 
confidence  keeps  her  working  men  from  their  ma- 
chines. There  Is  In  Poland  and  Austria  that  same 
combination  of  strong  men  and  good  machines, 
ready  to  work  for  their  daily  bread.  But  the  men 
are  starving  because  they  have  no  work  by  which 
to  earn  food;  and  at  the  same  time  our  farmers  and 


THE  COST  IN  MONEY  81 

those  of  the  Argentine  are  complaining  that  they 
have  slack  markets  for  their  food-products. 

What  shrewd  observers  expect  of  the  next  few 
years  in  Europe  may  be  seen  in  the  present  policy  of 
the  British  Labor  Party.  Rightly  or  wrongly,  the 
party  leaders  believe  that  they  can  take  over  the 
power  in  England.  But  they  say  frankly  that  they 
do  not  intend  to  do  it  now,  because  the  next  four  or 
five  years  will  bring  such  economic  consequences  of 
the  late  war  as  to  swamp  and  discredit  the  faction 
in  power.  They  prefer  to  let  the  "old  crowd"  take 
the  onus.  Possibly,  the  heaviest  costs  of  the  late 
war  are  still  to  come. 

Nor  can  we  reckon  the  economic  losses  of  Arma- 
geddon without  counting  in  the  past — the  thirty  or 
forty  years  of  intensive  preparation  which  preceded 
the  explosion  of  19 14.  During  that  period,  when 
chancellories  kept  the  peace  by  the  old-fashioned 
system  of  checks  and  balances,  Europe  was  tradi- 
tionally an  armed  camp.  Economically,  it  was  in  a 
state  of  perpetual  warfare.  National  wealth  grew 
in  this  period,  but  national  expenditure  on  armies 
and  navies  grew  faster.  In  France,  which  for  va- 
rious reasons  we  may  study  most  easily,  the  military 
and  naval  budget  increased  from  fifteen  to  twenty 
per  cent  during  each  decade;  and  the  indirect  appro- 
priations for  the  army,  as  for  example  in  the  item  of 
strategic  railways,  even  faster.  Directly  and  indi- 
rectly, she  was  by  1905,  ten  years  before  the  great 
war,  spending  between  two  hundred  and  ten  and  two 


82  THE  NEXT  WAR 

hundred  and  twenty-five  million  dollars  annually  on 
her  army  and  navy.  At  the  same  time,  she  was 
paying  about  a  hundred  and  fifty  millions  annually 
in  interest  on  the  debts  of  old  wars — she  was  still 
financing  the  campaigns  of  the  two  Napoleons.  Such 
figures  mean  nothing  to  the  average  mind;  but  here 
is  a  basis  of  comparison.  France  is  strongly  central- 
ized. Most  of  her  popular  education  is  financed  not 
by  the  city  or  county  as  with  us,  but  by  the  national 
government.  And  in  the  years  when  it  was  paying 
more  than  two  hundred  millions  for  the  next  war, 
a  hundred  and  fifty  millions  for  old  wars,  the  na- 
tional government  spent  on  education  about  forty-six 
millions. 

Now  this  was  almost  dead  economic  loss.  In  the 
ordinary  processes  of  industry,  part  of  the  receipts 
at  least  are  going  to  increase  the  world's  wealth. 
Take  for  example  the  ultimate  destiny  of  a  dollar 
paid  into  the  cotton  manufacturing  business.  Most 
of  it  buys  someone  bread  and  meat  and  shelter  and 
clothing.  But  just  so  m.any  cents  or  mills  of  that 
dollar  buy  factories,  machinery,  swifter  transporta- 
tion— something  which  will  make  more  wealth  and 
still  more  wealth.  It  is  like  a  crop  of  which  the 
greater  part  is  eaten,  the  lesser  part  kept  for  seed. 
The  money  spent  on  armies  and  navies  in  no  wise  in- 
creases the  world's  real  wealth,  even  when  the  shells 
merely  lie  and  disintegrate  in  the  magazines,  the 
guns  grow  old-fashioned  in  the  barracks.    And  when 


THE  COST  IN  MONEY  83 

they  are  used,  of  course  they  are  actively  destroying 
wealth. 

The  war  came;  and  it  was  possible  under  the  urge 
of  national  necessity  to  increase  taxation.  All  did, 
some  more,  some  less.  England  crowded  on  the 
taxes  until  the  man  of  an  average  middle-class  in- 
come was  paying  before  the  end  some  forty  per  cent 
of  his  income.  Germany  and  France  paid  less 
heavily  at  the  time.  Each  was  calculating  on  vic- 
tory, and  on  making  the  loser  pay.  France  won; 
and  already  she  realizes  that  she  cannot  begin  to 
reimburse  herself,  even  though  she  milks  from  Ger- 
many her  last  mark.  And  Germany  the  loser — 
expression  fails  in  the  face  of  her  predicament. 

But  tax  as  they  might,  the  nations  had  at  once  to 
begin  drawing  on  their  future,  asking  for  unprece- 
dented loans  both  from  their  own  people  and  from 
foreigners.     Debts  piled  up  beyond  imagination. 

Let  me  set  down  a  few  figures.  They  will  not 
mean  much  to  the  reader,  I  suppose,  any  more  than 
they  mean  much  to  the  writer;  they  are  too  over- 
whelmingly big.  In  actual  money,  paid  out  over  the 
counter,  virtually  all  taken  from  the  world's  accu- 
mulated wealth,  the  war  cost  one  hundred  and 
eighty-six  billion  dollars.  If  you  add  the  indirect 
cost  such  as  destruction  of  property,  loss  of  produc- 
tion and  the  capitalized  value  of  the  human  lives, 
the  sum  reaches  three  hundred  and  thirty-seven 
billion  dollars.    The  national  debts  of  Great  Britain 


84  THE  NEXT  WAR 

rose  from  three  and  a  half  billions  to  thirty-nine 
billions;  of  France  from  six  and  a  third  billions  to 
forty-six  billions;  of  the  United  States  from  one 
billion  to  nearly  twenty-five  billions. 

By  certain  comparisons,  we  may  arrive  at  an  un- 
derstanding of  these  figures.  Again  I  will  take 
France  as  the  best  example  at  hand.  Her  total 
national  wealth — farms,  mines,  factories,  buildings, 
railroads,  canals,  everything  she  owns — was  esti- 
mated in  1920  at  ninet3'--two  and  a  half  billion  dol- 
lars. Her  debt,  as  I  have  said,  is  forty-six  billion 
dollars — almost  exactlv  half  her  total  wealth.  That 
wealth  was  her  heritage.  When  the  first  Gaul,  long 
before  Julius  Caesar  came,  cleared  land  on  the  bor- 
ders of  the  Seine,  he  was  creating  national  wealth 
for  the  France  of  1920.  It  had  been  accumulating 
for  more  than  twenty  centuries.  Now  we  will  say 
that  you  own  a  factory  worth,  at  current  market 
rates,  something  like  one  hundred  thousand  dollars. 
There  comes  a  period  of  unprecedented  hard  times, 
in  the  midst  of  which  you  have  a  fire  which — since 
you  carry  no  insurance — destroys  the  value  of  a  part 
of  your  plant.  You  find  that  your  business  is  worth 
ninety-two  thousand  and  five  hundred  dollars;  and 
that  you  have  been  forced  to  put  upon  it  a  mortgage 
of  forty-six  thousand  dollars.  Then  you  face  an- 
other period  of  hard  times,  with  money  tight,  mar- 
kets poor,  raw  materials  hard  to  get.  That,  in  terms 
of  business,  is  the  situation  of  France.  Great 
Britain  is  only  a  little  less  affected.     Her  national 


National 

Debts 

of 

United  States,  Qreat  Britain  6)  France 

in.  1915  and  in  1920. 

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THE  COST  IN  MONEY  87 

wealth  is  one  hundred  and  twenty  billions ;  her  debt 
is  nearly  forty  billions.  So  it  goes,  in  greater  or  less 
degree,  with  Germany,  Italy,  the  Austrian  states, 
the  Balkan  states.  This  apart  from  the  actual 
physical  destruction  of  property. 

There  again  we  run  into  incomprehensible  figures. 
I  have  spoken  already  of  the  growing  disproportion 
between  the  cost  of  the  cannon  and  its  charge  on 
the  one  hand  and  the  destruction  which  it  can  accom- 
plish on  the  other.  Of  that,  Northern  France 
stands  as  the  living  proof.  France  lost  the  most 
heavily  in  property,  as  she  did  in  life.  Proportion- 
ately to  her  population  and  wealth,  Belgium's  loss 
is  only  a  little  less;  among  the  greater  nations,  Italy 
stands  next.  Physical  destruction  of  property  was 
very  unevenly  distributed.  But  it  all  comes  out  of 
the  wealth  of  the  world;  and  so  interlocked  are  the 
activities  of  modern  nations  that  you  cannot  destroy 
any  considerable  body  of  wealth  in  one  region  with- 
out causing  disturbances  in  others. 

Let  us  abandon  abstract  figures  and  make  this 
the  basis  of  comparison:  In  1906,  the  city  of  San 
Francisco  was  partially  destroyed  by  earthquake  and 
fire.  A  year  or  so  later,  we  had  a  brief  financial 
depression;  there  were  lesser  depressions  in  England 
and  Germany,  where  insurance  companies  had  been 
hard  hit.  And  many  economists  said  that  it  was  all 
due  to  the  loss  of  wealth  and  the  disturbance  of  con- 
ditions caused  by  the  San  Francisco  disaster. 

In   Northern    France,   about   as   many  buildings 


88  THE  NEXT  WAR 

were  destroyed — omitting  those  merely  damaged — 
as  there  are  in  Greater  New  York;  and  New  York. 
has  twelve  or  thirteen  times  the  population  of  San 
Francisco  at  the  time  of  the  disaster.  The  region 
of  San  Francisco  lost  no  canals,  railroads,  or  im- 
proved highways.  She  was  not  a  manufacturing 
city;  and  such  factories  as  she  had  mostly  escaped. 
But  France  did  lose  factories,  canals,  railways,  high- 
ways in  her  most  thickly  populated  country — a  belt 
four  hundred  miles  long,  from  five  miles  wide  in 
Alsace  to  fifty  miles  wide  north  and  west  of  Noyon. 
In  the  region  merely  invaded,  about  Lille,  she  lost 
enormous  values  in  machines  turned  into  scrap-iron, 
and  eventually  into  shells,  by  the  conquerers.  The 
disaster  of  1906  destroyed  no  agricultural  land. 
France  lost  to  agriculture,  for  at  least  a  generation, 
from  four  to  five  hundred  thousand  acres — land 
with  its  top-soil  blown  to  the  winds,  or  ground  into 
the  clay  subsoil.  Roughly,  I  estimate  that  the  de- 
struction of  visible,  physical  property  in  Northern 
France — to  say  nothing  of  Belgium,  Italy,  Serbia, 
Greece  and  East  Prussia — was  equivalent  to  twenty 
or  twenty-five  San  Francisco  disasters.  Leaving  out 
the  direct  property  loss  of  other  nations,  the  orgy 
of  spending  during  four  and  a  quarter  years,  the 
incredible  national  debts  and  their  interest,  this  belt 
of  destruction  in  France  alone  would  almost  account 
for  the  present  disturbances  of  conditions  in  the 
whole  world. 

The  war-bill  of  nations  in  peace  times  consists  of 


Cosb  of  World  Wcir 

compared  with 

Cosb  of  All  Weirs 

from  17Q3  (be^innin^  of  Napoleonic  Weirs) 

to  IQIO 


WORLD 
■WAR 


THE  COST  IN  MONEY  91 

interest  on  the  national  debt,  caused  by  old  wars, 
plus  the  direct  cost  of  supporting  armament.  Still 
using  France  as  an  example;  if  she  spends  as  much 
on  her  army  and  navy  in  the  period  between  1920 
and  1930  even  as  she  did  in  the  period  between  1900 
and  19 10,  her  war-bill  will  be  multiplied  by  about 
three  and  a  half.  She  may  get  a  certain  amount  of 
German  indemnity.  That,  probably,  will  not  be 
enough  to  restore  her  North  and  to  finance  her  pen- 
sions; it  will  not  go  toward  lightening  the  taxes 
which  pay  the  war-bill.  France,  like  the  other  Eu- 
ropean nations,  was  taxed  in  19 14  to  the  point  of 
absurdity;  now,  she  must  eventually  multiply  the 
taxes  by  three  or  four.  Even  this  calculation  does 
not  involve  a  sinking-fund  to  pay  off  the  debt.  Fifty 
years  from  now,  possibly  a  hundred  years,  France 
will  still  be  paying  the  bill  of  19 14-18.  And  this  is 
true  not  only  of  France,  but  of  all  the  other  nations 
who  fought  through  the  great  war.  In  hardship, 
toil,  reduced  standard  of  living,  the  next  two  gener- 
ations will  pay — or  else — this  is  still  possible — 
European  civilization  will  tumble  into  the  gulf  of 
anarchy.  H.  G.  Wells  said  to  the  writer,  a  month 
after  the  war  began,  "All  our  lives  we  shall  be 
talking  of  the  good,  old  days  of  19 13."  That  war- 
prophecy  is  being  fulfilled. 

Let  us  now  bring  the  subject  home.  We,  of  all, 
lost  the  least  in  property  as  in  men.  We  had,  in- 
deed, profited  greatly  in  the  two  years  and  a  half 
of  our  neutrality.     We  held,  by  the  end  of  that 


92  THE  NEXT  WAR 

period,  almost  half  of  the  gold  In  the  world.  Of 
course,  we  poured  all  that  prosperity  and  much  more 
into  the  last  two  years  of  the  world  war.  We  multi- 
plied our  national  debt  by  twenty-four.  We  are 
beginning  for  the  first  time  to  know  what  taxation 
really  means.  We  grumble  at  the  heavy  Income  tax; 
yet  if  we  are  to  meet  our  obligations,  it  must  con- 
tinue at  something  like  its  present  scale  for  the  life- 
time of  this  generation.  Fifty  years  from  now,  we 
may  still  be  paying.  We  experienced  during  the  two 
years  following  November,  191 8,  an  era  of  hectic 
prosperity — followed  by  a  collapse,  in  which  we  are 
learning  that  war-gold  is  fool's  gold.  All  things 
considered,  we  came  as  near  as  anyone  to  winning 
Armageddon.  But  everyone  loses  a  modern  war, 
the  victors  along  with  the  vanquished;  economically, 
we  too  lost. 

Before  we  entered  the  great  war,  we  were  called 
a  pacifist  people  and  as  such  were  the  scorn  of 
European  militarists.  Indeed,  war  had  troubled  us 
less  than  any  other  great  people.  Since  our  federa- 
tion, we  had  fought  only  one  first-class  war,  that 
between  the  states  in  1861-65.  The  war  of  1812, 
the  Mexican  War,  the  Spanish  War  were,  socially 
and  economically  speaking,  comparable  only  to  the 
small  colonial  expeditions  of  Great  Britain  and 
France.  Beginning  with  the  eighties  and  nineties  of 
the  past  century,  we  had  built  up  a  comparatively 
strong  navy;  by  1914,  it  ranked  third  or  perhaps 
fourth  among  those  of  the  great  powers.    However, 


Cosb  of  the  World  War 
during   its  last  year 


The  -money  the  World  W^r  cosb  for  a  sm§le  hour 
during  the  Usk  year  would  huUci  ten  Ki^h  schools 
costing   one    ■million   dollars   eacK. 

The  money  it  cost   for  a   single    d^y   wouild   budd    in 
each   of    tKe    48    states    two   hospitals    costing   ^500,000 
each;   two    ^1,000,000   hi^h    schools    in    each    state; 
300   recrea.tion   centers  with  g>ymn<a.siuTns  and   swim- 
rain^   pools   costing    *30Q000  eacK;   ccn^   there  would 
be   leFt    *G,000,000    to    promote   industrial    education. 

*240.OO0,00O  was  the  total  cost  per  day  for  ci.ll 
countries.  It  indudes  only  direct  costs,  not 
the   destruction    o£  civil   property. 


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THE  COST  IN  MONEY  95 

our  standing  army  was  to  European  militarists  a 
joke.  At  one  period  between  the  Spanish  War  and 
the  Great  War  we  had  only  twenty-five  thousand 
regulars  under  arms,  whereas  in  several  European 
countries  of  smaller  population  than  ours  the  stand- 
ing army  consisted  of  more  than  three  quarters  of  a 
million  soldiers;  and  every  able-bodied  man  had 
been  trained  and  equipped. 

Yet  in  the  year  1920,  with  the  war  over  and  done, 
with  our  great  army  demobilized  and  our  fleets  back 
to  the  business  of  manoeuvres  and  visiting,  we  were 
spending  the  greater  part  of  our  national  revenues 
on  wars,  old  and  new.  In  1920,  the  proportion  was 
ninety-three  per  cent. 

What  could  our  government  do  with  this  money? 
What  could  It  not  do! 

A  little  before  the  Great  War,  I  was  talking  to 
an  expert,  nationally  famous,  on  good  roads.  He 
spoke  of  the  highways  so  vitally  important  in  our 
great  and  wide-spreading  country  and  of  the  stag- 
gering costs  of  road  improvement.  "We  could  of 
course  pave  every  country  road  in  the  United 
States,"  he  said,  "and  the  economies  it  would  intro- 
duce into  transportation  would  make  it  a  paying 
proposition  in  the  end.  But  the  initial  cost  and  the 
upkeep — you  can't  possibly  raise  enough  money. 
It  would  take,  I  estimate,  seventy-five  per  cent  of 
our  Federal  revenues."  There  you  are.  This  "im- 
possible" but  paying  proposition  would  take  seventy- 
five  per  cent  of  our  revenues;  war  in   1920  took 


96  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ninety-three  per  cent.  We  could  make  all  the  com- 
mon roads  of  the  United  States  like  the  famous 
main  highways  of  France  or  Belgium,  for  the  cost 
of  our  wars,  past,  present  and  future — and  still 
have  money  in  the  bank. 

In  our  government  are  a  number  of  bureaus  con- 
cerned with  increasing  production,  fighting  disease, 
supervising,  as  it  seems  that  only  governments  can 
supervise,  the  agencies  which  conserve  life  and  in- 
crease production.  Our  entomologists  have  reduced 
such  plant  scourges  as  the  San  Jose  scale  and  grape 
phylloxera  almost  to  impotence,  so  saving  us  many 
millions  yearly;  they  are  on  their  way  to  conquer  the 
boll  weevil  In  cotton.  Our  ichthyologists  have  plans, 
now  only  partly  realizable  from  lack  of  money, 
greatly  to  Increase  our  fish  supply.  Our  boards  of 
health,  under  national  supervision,  have  virtually 
killed  yellow  fever  and  smallpox,  greatly  reduced 
malaria  and  typhoid  fever,  are  beginning  to  attack 
those  ''social  diseases"  which  are  next  to  war  the 
great  scourge  of  the  human  race. 

Go  into  any  of  these  Washington  bureaus  and 
some  specialist,  some  practical  dreamer  struggling 
along  at  a  salary  running  from  fifteen  hundred  dol- 
lars to  three  thousand  dollars  a  year,  will  tell  you 
what  "his  people"  could  do  to  multiply  production 
and  improve  human  conditions,  to  lengthen  and 
fortify  life,  to  increase  the  beauty  or  usefulness  of 
the  world  "if  we  only  had  the  money."  But  they 
haven't  the  money.     For  these  activities,  the  Gov- 


Actual  expnditures   of  the  United 
States  for  th£  fiscal  year  IQIQ -20 
(Loans  ko  European  Governments 
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PENSIONS,  INTEREST 
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ARMY  &,  NAVY 
(PREPARATIONS 
FOR   FUTURE 
WARS) 


1,348  MILLIONS 


THE  COST  IN  MONEY  99 

ernment  grants  less  than  one  per  cent  of  the  Na- 
tional revenue.  In  1920,  the  existing  army  and 
navy  absorbed  thirty-eight  per  cent;  and  the  whole 
war  bill,  as  I  have  said,  was  ninety-three  per  cent. 

What  could  we,  "the  pacifist  nation  of  the  world," 
not  do  with  that  ninety-three  per  cent?  You  re- 
member the  Roosevelt  Dam  in  the  Far  West — 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  acres  transformed  from 
desert  to  fertile  farms  with  a  little  government 
money.  Millions  more  are  awaiting  the  same  trans- 
formation. Here  is  a  chance  to  increase  our  true 
national  greatness;  but  the  government,  of  course, 
cannot  undertake  that  because  it  cannot  spare  the 
money.  Our  forests  are  shrinking;  we  feel  the  ef- 
fect in  the  rising  price  of  lumber,  the  shortage  of 
wood-pulp.  We  need  to  reforest  on  a  large  scale; 
that  work,  European  countries  have  learned,  can  be 
most  cheaply,  easily  and  intelligently  done  by  a  cen- 
tral government.  We  are  reforesting,  if  at  all, 
on  a  microscopic  scale;  we  are  barely  keeping  down 
fires.  All  because  we  cannot  afford  the  money  from 
our  national  revenues.  Wars,  past,  present  and 
future,  cost  too  much. 

Then  comes  the  period  when  our  long  prepara- 
tion for  new  wars  becomes — action.  Then  arrives 
an  orgy  of  spending  without  return — and  a  greater 
war-bill  for  the  future. 

But  we  are  treating  of  "the  next  war."  By  that 
we  mean  of  course  not  a  little  "settling"  war  such 
as  the  present  British  and  French  campaigns  in  the 


loo  THE  NEXT  WAR 

Near  East,  the  skirmishes  along  the  Russian  border, 
nor  yet  the  minor  colonial  expeditions.  We  mean  a 
struggle  between  industrial  nations,  thoroughly  pre- 
pared. In  terms  of  economics,  will  that  struggle 
be  less  costly  than  the  last,  or  more? 


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"National    debt    at    end    cf    v«u-. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

ECONOMICS  AND   THE   NEXT  WAR 

In  all  the  major  wars  of  the  past  three  centur- 
ies, one  traces  a  certain  progression  from  armed 
contest  between  individual  nations  to  armed  contest 
between  alliances.  Sometimes  indeed,  two  hostile 
nations  are  "isolated,"  as  when  the  rest  of  Europe 
managed  to  keep  out  of  the  war  between  France 
and  Germany  in  1870.  But  the  tendency  remains. 
And  there  is  a  reasonable  cause  for  this — the  in- 
creasing speed  and  facility  of  transportation,  the 
increasing  interdependence  of  nations.  In  19 14, 
according  to  an  authority  on  transportation,  any 
man  was  in  terms  of  time  eleven  times  nearer  to  any 
given  point  in  the  world  than  In  18 14.  There  you 
have  one  explanation  for  the  world-wide  spread  of 
the  Great  War. 

If  things  in  this  "new  world"  are  to  go  in  the  old 
manner,  the  chancellories  of  Europe  will  seek  to 
keep  an  impermanent  peace,  will  give  themselves  a 
"breathing-space  between  wars"  by  forming  al- 
liances. With  the  major  nations  struggling  even  for 
greater  advantage,  with  the  smaller  nations  in  grow- 
ing fear  of  their  own  defencelessness,  the  alliances 

103 


104  THE  NEXT  WAR 

will  naturally  tend  to  grow  greater  and  greater.  "In 
the  next  war  there  will  be  no  neutrals,"  some  say; 
almost  certainly,  in  the  next  European  war.  Spain, 
Switzerland,  Holland,  Scandinavia,  Greece,  will  be 
afraid,  remembering  Belgium,  to  remain  out  of  al- 
liances. Indeed,  Belgium  has  pointed  the  way.  A 
recognized  neutral  up  to  the  Great  War,  she  has  re- 
nounced the  principle  of  neutrality,  and  allied  her- 
self with  France.  Probably  the  great  European 
powers  will  draw  in  the  Orient  actively — Japan's 
part,  China's  part  in  the  late  war  were  merely 
passive.  For  the  world-machine  tends  to  become 
ever  more  complex,  and  nations  ever  more  interde- 
pendent. The  swift  airship  is  here;  if  a  man  is 
eleven  times  nearer  any  given  point  than  he  was  in 
1 8 14,  soon  he  will  be  twenty  times  nearer. 

Can  we  stay  out  of  the  next  general  war?  We 
could  not  stay  out  of  the  last.  We  are  passing  from 
a  stage  where  we  depended  for  foreign  trade  mainly 
on  raw  materials,  whose  sale  does  not  need  to  be 
"pushed,"  to  the  industrial  stage.  Increasingly,  our 
exports  will  consist  of  manufactured  goods.  For- 
eign markets  will  be  to  us  not  dumping-grounds  for 
short  seasons  of  overproduction  but  real  factors  in 
our  national  prosperity.  And  foreign  markets  for 
manufactured  goods  need  cultivation,  even  forcing. 
With  our  unrivalled  wealth,  we  shall  store  up  sur- 
plus capital,  which  will  find  more  attractive  returns 
in  undeveloped  regions  at  home.  That  is  happening 
already.     Since  the  war,  hundreds  of  millions,  per- 


ECONOMICS  AND  THE  NEXT  WAR  105 

haps  billions,  of  American  dollars  have  been  invested 
in  new,  promising  commercial  fields  abroad.  So, 
if  we  play  the  game  as  we  find  it,  we  shall  enter  the 
circle  of  "financial  imperialism"  and  find  ourselves 
in  some  way  much  more  closely  affected  by  the  next 
war  than  we  were  by  the  last,  and  correspondingly 
under  a  greater  urge  to  enter  it  as  belligerents. 

The  spread  of  the  next  war  may  conceivably  be 
limited  by  diplomacy  as  was  the  war  of  1870;  even 
so,  the  next  one  after  that  probably  cannot  be  lim- 
ited; and  all  our  "proud  isolation,"  our  tradition 
against  entangling  alliances,  will  not  keep  us  out. 

The  Great  War,  considered  in  terms  of  econom- 
ics, began  not  in  19 14  but  in  1871,  when  the  French 
and  Germans  signed  the  Treaty  of  Frankfort — 
when  the  European  nations  began  to  increase  their 
standing  armaments.  In  the  same  sense,  the  next 
war  began  when,  after  the  Armistice  of  191 8,  the 
great  powers  kept  up  their  armies,  started  experi- 
ments with  more  eflficient  but  more  expensive  ways 
of  killing.  It  will  be  war  by  machinery  from  now 
on,  not  war  by  hand.  And  machine-work  requires 
a  much  greater  initial  outlay  of  capital  than  hand- 
work. Naval  warfare  has  always  been  war  by  ma- 
chinery. It  will  not  be  necessary  for  me  to  prove 
by  figures  the  greater  cost  of  a  navy,  in  proportion 
to  the  number  of  men  employed,  than  of  an  army. 
That  is  going  to  be  changed.  The  tank  and  the 
aeroplane  have  come — air-machines  and  land-ma- 
chines, equivalent  to  the  destroyer,  the  submarine 


io6  THE  NEXT  WAR 

and  the  battleship,  which  are  sea-machines.  Of 
course,  a  big  tank  can  whip  a  little  tank  just  as  a  big 
man  can  whip  a  little  man.  There  is  no  more  prac- 
tical limit  to  the  size  of  tanks  than  to  that  of  naval 
vessels.  The  same  rule  probably  holds  true  of 
aeroplanes.  Consequently,  as  soon  as  the  European 
powers  begin  to  wriggle  out  of  their  present  fix, 
we  may  expect  them,  with  what  margin  they  have, 
to  begin  a  race  of  armament  more  expensive  in  pro- 
portion to  their  resources  than  the  race  of  1871- 
1914.  The  tank  of  today  may  be  compared  to  a 
caravel.  We  shall  have  the  destroyer-tank;  then 
some  nation  will  come  along  with  the  cruiser-tank, 
and  the  others  must  follow  or  underwrite  defeat. 
And  so  on,  up  to  the  dreadnought  tank — a  gas- 
proofed  fortress  on  caterpillar  wheels,  perhaps  as 
complex  and  expensive  as  the  sea-dreadnought.  And 
if  one  alliance  increases  her  fleet  of  land-dread- 
noughts from  a  hundred  to  a  hundred  and  twenty, 
from  a  thousand  to  twelve  hundred,  the  rival  al- 
liance must  let  out  another  notch  and  follow.  You 
may,  if  you  wish,  translate  all  this  into  terms  of 
aircraft,  and  the  economic  result  will  be  the  same. 
In  the  last  war,  nations  learned  that  they  must 
bend  every  resource,  and  especially  every  industrial 
resource,  to  victory.  But  some  of  them  learned  it 
rather  late.  Even  Germany  was  for  a  long  time 
manufacturing  and  exporting  to  the  adjacent  neutral 
countries  such  commodities  as  machinery.  Later,  in 
the  fierce  stress  of  the  war,  Germany  turned  all  her 


ECONOMICS  AND  THE  NEXT  WAR  107 

machine-factories  into  munitions  factories.  Eng- 
land went  on  for  nearly  two  years  with  a  business- 
as-usual  policy  before  she  learned  she  had  better 
make  munitions  her  sole  business.  There  can  be  no 
such  dalliance  in  the  next  war.  "It  will  not  be  de- 
clared; it  will  burst."  Upon  the  promptness  and 
speed  of  the  initial  thrust  may  depend  victory — then 
or  later.  Not  only  must  the  magazines  be  always 
full,  the  tanks  and  aeroplanes  always  in  complete 
commission,  the  gas  retorts  always  charged;  but  you 
must  have  your  factories  always  ready  for  an  imme- 
diate change.  You  must  be  prepared  at  the  shortest 
notice  to  turn  your  dye-and-chemical  works  into 
poison  gas  works,  your  sewing-machines  and  type- 
writer factories  into  factories  for  shell-parts — and 
so  on  through  a  thousand  industries.  This  requires 
an  industrial  readjustment  obviously  expensive,  still 
more  subtly  expensive. 

When  the  war  comes,  you  start  war-work  not 
desultorily  as  in  19 14,  but  full  speed  from  the  mark 
— not  at  a  five  per  cent  scale  gradually  increasing, 
as  in  1914,  but  as  near  as  possible  to  a  one  hundred 
per  cent  scale.  Your  whole  population  has  been 
mobilized,  perhaps  partly  trained,  in  advance.  Your 
young  woman  knows  her  place  in  the  factory  and 
reports  at  once  to  the  foreman,  just  as  your  young 
man  knows  his  place  in  the  ranks  and  reports  at 
once  to  the  sergeant.  The  process  of  turning  the 
whole  national  energy  from  wealth  to  waste  begins 
at  once,  full  power.     The  next  war  may  be  shorter 


io8  THE  NEXT  WAR 

than  the  last;  it  can  scarcely,  at  this  intensive  pace, 
be  less  costly. 

Concerning  the  actual  destruction  of  physical 
property,  one  may  speak  with  less  certainty.  It  all 
depends  upon  the  larger  strategy.  1  have  suggested 
the  elimination  of  all  life  in  such  a  city  as  Paris — or 
New  York — as  a  possible  result.  That  could  be  ac- 
complished by  such  a  gas  as  Lewisite.  Now  Lewisite 
whirled  in  a  lethal  cloud  ov^er  Paris  would  not 
greatly  injure  property.  When  at  length  the  poison 
was  dissipated,  the  Opera  would  still  be  there  and 
the  Louvre  and  the  great  railway  terminals  and 
the  factories — a  little  corroded  perhaps,  but  still 
usable  after  you  cleaned  out  the  corpses  and  tidied 
up  a  bit.  So  perhaps  a  better  way  of  breaking  up 
the  "resistance  of  the  rear"  would  be  to  exterminate 
not  the  human  Paris  but  the  physical  Paris.  That 
could  be  done  in  one  gigantic  conflagration  started 
by  inextinguishable  chemicals  dropped  from  a  few 
aircraft.  The  method  is  practicable  even  now,  in 
the  infancy  of  chemical  warfare;  and  the  military 
chemists  of  Europe  are  experimenting  further  along 
these  lines.  Such  a  campaign  would  of  course  not 
be  confined  to  Paris;  although  Paris  as  a  centre  for 
the  brains  of  war,  as  the  most  vital  knot  in  the  rail- 
way web  and  as  a  great  factory  city,  is  eminently 
important.  It  would  be  aimed  also  at  Lyons  and 
St.  Etienne,  great  manufacturing  cities,  at  Mar- 
seilles, Cherbourg,  Havre  and  Bordeaux,  the  great 


ECONOMICS  AND  THE  NEXT  WAR  109 

ports,  at  a  hundred  little  cities  which  do  their  part 
in  making  munitions. 

In  such  a  campaign  of  conflagrations,  the  loss  of 
life  would  necessarily  be  less  than  in  a  killing  attack 
with  gas.  But  possibly  not  much.  Imagine  Paris 
suddenly  become  a  superheated  furnace  in  a  hundred 
spots;  imagine  a  swift  rush  of  flame  through  every 
quarter;  imagine  the  population  struggling,  piling 
up,  shriveling  with  the  heat;  imagine  the  survivors 
ranging  the  open  fields  in  the  condition  of  starving 
animals. 

Such  a  campaign  could  in  a  few  weeks  nearly 
equal  the  property-losses  of  the  Great  War;  espe- 
cially if  the  defenders,  whom  I  have  imagined  to  be 
the  French,  retaliated  on  the  attackers — say  the 
Germans — and  burned  Berlin  and  the  Rhine  towns. 

So  far  as  we  can  see  now,  gas  will  probably  be 
the  standard  weapon  of  the  next  war.  High  ex- 
plosive will  still  be  used  on  an  extensive  scale;  but 
it  will  be  auxiliary  to  the  new  killing  instrument. 
It  is  unlikely  that  there  will  be  a  locked  trench-line 
and  a  steady  bombardment  lasting  for  years.  Con- 
sequently— ignoring  the  possibility  of  great  confla- 
grations— we  may  hope  for  a  smaller  loss  in  the 
item  of  buildings.  On  the  other  hand,  the  bill  will 
probably  show  a  larger  item  for  destroyed  fields — 
agricultural  wealth.  The  struggle  just  finished  was 
the  first  in  history  where  any  considerable  area  of 
land  was  ruined  for  cultivation.     Now  it  is  a  prop- 


no  THE  NEXT  WAR 

erty  of  the  new  poison  gas  that  it  sterilizes — not 
only  kills  cells  but  prevents  the  growth  of  cells. 
Concerning  one  successor  of  Lewisite  gas  an  expert 
has  said:  "You  burst  a  container  carrying  a  minute 
quantity  of  the  substance  which  makes  the  gas,  at 
the  foot  of  a  tree.  You  do  not  see  the  fumes  rise; 
it  is  invisible.  But  within  a  few  seconds  you  see 
the  leaves  begin  to  shrivel.  While  we  are  not  quite 
certain,  we  estimate  that  land  on  which  this  gas  has 
fallen  will  grow  nothing  for  about  seven  years."  In 
the  next  war, — unless  we  discover  meantime  some 
still  more  effective  method  of  killing — clouds  of  such 
gas  will  sweep  over  hundreds  of  square  miles,  not 
only  eliminating  all  unprotected  life,  animal  and 
vegetable,  but  sterilizing  the  soil — "for  about 
seven  years."  What  were  farms,  orchards  and  gar- 
dens will  become  in  a  breath  deserts.  The  power 
of  its  soil  to  produce  food  is  the  first,  vital  item  in 
the  wealth  of  nations.  It  would  seem  that  this  in- 
creased loss  of  productive  land  should  at  least 
balance  the  decreased  loss  in  buildings. 

So  modem  warfare,  in  its  economic  aspect,  fol- 
lows the  same  rule  as  in  its  human  aspect.  Now 
that  we  have  renounced  all  pretty  rules  of  chivalry, 
now  that  we  have  put  brains  into  the  business,  its 
destructiveness  ever  increases.  There,  perhaps,  lies 
the  best  chance  of  eliminating  it  from  the  world. 
The  desire  to  create  and  to  conserve  wealth  is  deeply 
implanted  in  the  bosom  of  man.  Why  not?  The 
two  primary  forces  by  which  a  species  lives  are  the 


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ECONOMICS  AND  THE  NEXT  WAR  in 

desire  for  food  and  the  desire  to  reproduce.  This 
desire  springs  from  the  primary  desire  for  food. 
Someone  has  pointed  out  that  the  temperance  re- 
formers of  the  United  States  made  little  progress 
so  long  as  they  harped  on  the  sin  of  drunkenness. 
Only  when  they  touched  the  question  on  its  economic 
side,  showed  that  alcohol  was  a  great  enemy  to 
wealth  and  production,  did  the  prohibition  move- 
ment go  with  a  rush.  In  some  fifty  years  of  agita- 
tion, pacifists  have  dwelt  on  the  cruelties  and  horrors 
of  war — always  the  moral  and  sentimental  side. 
Now  we  are  learning  that  it  does  not  pay.  The  vic- 
tor may,  relatively,  lose  less  than  the  vanquished. 
But  victor  and  vanquished  both  lose  in  the  absolute. 
That  may  be  the  chnching  argument. 


CHAPTER  IX 


"the  tonic  of  nations" 


The  moral  value  in  peace,  war  and  military 
preparation  can  of  course  be  treated  with  less  cer- 
tainty than  the  racial  and  economic  values.  You 
cannot  measure  virtue  with  a  yardstick  nor  establish 
by  statistics  the  comparative  virtue  and  vice,  honor 
and  dishonor,  truth  and  falsehood  in  any  man  or 
any  race.  Here  one  must  rely  on  general  observa- 
tion. 

Up  to  the  great  struggle  in  19 14-18,  the  mili- 
tarist and  the  aggressive  patriot  had  somewhat  the 
better  of  the  moral  argument.  Obviously  the  man 
who  offered  up  his  life  for  the  welfare  or  glory  or 
whatsoever  of  his  clan,  tribe  or  nation  is  doing  a 
fine,  high  thing.  "Greater  love  than  this  hath  no 
man."  But  modern  war  is  changing  even  that.  Of 
the  ten  million  killed  in  battle,  the  forty  million 
under  arms,  comparatively  few  made  the  supreme 
sacrifice  voluntarily.  They  were  conscripts.  They 
had  to  go  and  take  the  chance  of  being  killed — or 
die  with  certainty  against  a  wall.  Most  of  these 
men  had  received  their  one,  two  or  three  years  of 
military  training.     It  had  involved  mental  training, 

112 


"THE  TONIC  OF  NATIONS"         113 

designed  to  lash  them  up,  when  the  moment  of  ac- 
tion came,  to  a  love  of  war  and  a  desire  for  victory. 
That,  and  the  new  experience,  seemed  to  keep  them 
in  a  state  of  blithe  morale  for  the  first  few  months. 
There  is  a  curious,  exalted  state  of  mind  about  the 
early  days  of  a  war.  All  of  us  who  dodged  about 
the  rear,  immune  from  its  hardships,  nearly  immune 
from  its  dangers,  felt  that  mood.  Never  again 
shall  I  be  so  poignantly  moved  by  the  beauty  of 
paintings,  of  old  cathedrals,  of  women,  of  blossom- 
ing fields,  as  during  those  early  days  of  the  war.  It 
was  as  though  I  were  constantly  and  pleasantly  a 
little  drunk.  Now  the  men  at  the  front — ^wallow- 
ing in  filth  and  misery,  hardening  themselves  against 
instant  death — felt  nevertheless  something  of  the 
same  mood.  Then  it  passed,  as  intoxication  will. 
Thereafter,  they  "carried  on"  because  they  must. 
They  had  been  taught  it  was  their  duty;  most  of 
them  believed  that;  but  deep  down  lay  a  rebellion 
against  the  whole  principle  of  the  thing.  Boards 
of  morale  and  of  propaganda  invented  the  phrase 
"the  war  to  end  war."  The  men  of  the  trenches 
clutched  at  that.  "It  must  never  happen  again" — 
you  hear  the  phrase  to  weariness  from  the  British 
ranks,  the  French  ranks,  the  Belgian  ranks,  the 
Italian  ranks.  They  did  not  consider  themselves  as 
men  making  an  act  of  sacrifice  but  rather  as  men 
caught  in  a  wheel  from  which  there  was  no  present 
escape.  Germany  went  to  war  in  a  state  of  exalta- 
tion, lashed  up  through  forty  years  of  military  prepa- 


114  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ration.  But  the  German  ranks  must  have  felt  the 
same;  else  there  would  have  been  no  German  revo- 
lution. Read  Philip  GIbbs's  ''Now  It  Can  Be  Told" 
and  Henri  Barbousse's  "Under  Fire" — tolerant  ob- 
servers of  high  Intelligence  and  of  wide  experience 
these  two — and  learn  how  little  exaltation  of  self- 
sacrifice  there  was  in  Armageddon. 

Much  propaganda  was  spilled  during  the  war  to 
show  how,  in  the  same  manner,  Armageddon  prof- 
ited the  higher  morals  of  the  civilian  population. 
We  heard  of  the  "flapper"  who  became  a  heroine; 
of  the  frivolous  matron  who  put  off  her  silks  and 
chiffons,  put  on  denim  and  went  to  work  "in  muni- 
tions" ;  of  the  selfish  rich  man  who  gave  up  servants 
and  automobiles  and  shooting  lodges  to  help  finance 
the  war.  This  was  indeed  a  moral  gain — a  tem- 
porary one  at  least.  It  is  good  for  the  souls  of  the 
overfed  that  they  fast;  it  Is  good  for  the  souls  of 
the  Idle  that  they  go  to  work;  It  is  good  for  the  souls 
of  the  selfish  that  they  feel  the  thrill  of  a  generous, 
common  emotion.  But  how  lar.ge  was  this  special 
moral  gain?  Only  as  large  as  the  upper  class. 
Every  country  has  Its  submerged  tenth  and  corre- 
spondingly its  exalted  tenth.  The  other  eight-tenths 
do  not  sacrifice  comfort  or  nourishment  or  leisure — 
at  least  not  voluntarily.  They  have  no  margins  of 
the  kind  to  sacrifice.  When  the  accidents  of  war 
drove  a  family  ahead  of  an  invading  army  to  perish 
of  hunger  or  hardship  In  the  fields,  when  a  whole 
population  lived  on  reduced  rations  because  of  a 


'THE  TONIC  OF  NATIONS"         1 1 S 

blockade — that  was  not  a  voluntary  sacrifice.  To 
take  seriously  the  argument  that  such  a  war  as  we 
have  just  endured  is  good  because  people  "know  the 
nobility  of  self-sacrifice"  is  to  imply  that  the  upper 
class  is  the  only  class  which  counts. 

Unquestionably,  there  came  with  the  war  a  move- 
ment back  to  whatever  religion  the  peoples  of 
Armageddon  have.  But  I  could  never  feel,  observ- 
ing Europe  during  the  war,  that  this  was  the  highest 
and  healthiest  form  of  religion.  With  their  sons  in 
peril  of  death,  their  homes  in  peril  of  destruction, 
their  nations  in  peril  of  extinction,  people  turned 
toward  whatever  God  they  had — to  ask  for  some- 
thing. Nor — again  I  speak  from  observation — did 
this  special  form  of  religion  seem  to  survive  the  war. 

And  there  was  a  strong  back-current  which  cen- 
sorships, both  official  and  implied,  prevented  us 
from  describing  while  the  war  was  on.  Whole 
classes  of  the  European  population  threw  off  the 
ordinary  moral  restraints  imposed  by  peace.  The 
performances  of  a  certain  large  and  wealthy  group 
were  notorious;  and  once  I  spoke  frankly  on  this 
matter  to  a  woman  of  the  class  in  question.  "Oh, 
it's  eat,  drink  and  be  merry,  for  tomorrow  we  die," 
she  said.  "Our  people  are  doing  the  things  they've 
always  wanted  to  do.  Their  inhibitions  are  off. 
They  feel  that  nothing  matters  any  more." 

At  best,  whatever  moral  force  was  loosed  by  the 
Great  War  seems  to  me  an  impermanent  thing.  It 
did  not  survive  the  Armistice.    It  became  no  part  of 


ii6  THE  NEXT  WAR 

the  moral  heritage  of  mankind.  Lord  Roberts  de- 
scribed war  as  "the  tonic  of  races."  He  confused 
substance  with  shadow,  I  think.  It  is  a  stimulant,  not 
a  tonic.  Most  of  us  know  the  difference.  Iron  is 
a  tonic;  alcohol  a  stimulant.  Iron  strengthens  the 
system;  alcohol  seems  to  give  temporary  strength. 
Iron  is  a  permanent  gain;  the  reaction  makes  alco- 
hol a  permanent  loss.  It  is  related  that  the  Oriental 
alchemist  who  first  discovered  alcohol  thought  he 
had  the  elixir  of  life — and  drank  himself  to  death. 
The  militarist  mind,  still  primitive  in  its  workings, 
still  believing  that  things  are  so  because  they  seem 
to  be  so,  makes  the  same  mistake.  Regarded  in  the 
most  favorable  light,  the  state  of  war  is  a  stimulant, 
not  a  tonic. 

At  the  berrinning  of  the  late  war,  we  heard  from 
German,  French,  British  and  American  militarists 
that  nations  grew  soft  through  peace.  China 
they  set  up  as  the  awful  example — notwithstanding 
the  fact  that  war  is  the  only  practical  activity  for 
which  China  of  the  past  two  hundred  years  has 
shown  any  aptitude.  Her  Tai-Ping  rebellion  spilled 
more  blood  than  any  other  military  struggle  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  But  do  nations  grow  soft 
through  peace?  The  late  war  seemed  to  prove  quite 
the  contrary. 

During  the  forty-four  years  between  1870-19 14, 
the  Western  nations  of  the  European  continent, 
while  armed  for  war,  had  preserved  peace  by  the 
concert  of  the  powers.     There  were  small  colonial 


"THE  TONIC  OF  NATIONS"         117 

expeditions,  it  is  true;  but  those  involved  compara- 
tively few  men,  only  a  little  strain  on  the  national 
resources.  Britain's  expedition  against  the  Boers 
was  only  a  second-rate  war.  Europe  never  knew  a 
period  of  peace  so  long  and  so  profound.  When  the 
Germans  marched  on  France,  not  one  in  ten  thou- 
sand French  or  German  soldiers  had  ever  expe- 
rienced the  buzz  of  a  bullet  past  his  ear.  From 
these  people  grown  soft  through  peace  we  might 
have  expected  cowardice,  timidity — whole  armies 
breaking  at  the  first  fire.  We  got  unexampled  hero- 
ism. It  was  written  in  the  old  books  on  infantry 
tactics  when  a  body  of  troops  lost  ten  per  cent  or  at 
most  fifteen,  they  became  an  uncertain  quantity — 
even  though  you  had  been  able  to  replace  the  losses, 
it  was  time  to  take  them  out  if  you  could.  In  the 
Battle  of  the  Somme,  the  Allied  Armies  regularly 
kept  divisions  in  the  line  until  the  replacements 
numbered  fifty  per  cent — sometimes  more.  Whole 
companies,  whole  regiments  fought  so  often  to  the 
traditional  "last  handful"  that  the  newspapers 
scarcely  troubled  to  record  such  performances — 
they  had  grown  too  common.  Study,  if  you  want 
concrete  proof,  the  record  of  the  famous  French 
Twentieth  Corps,  recruited  from  Paris — city  men, 
and  therefore  most  affected  by  the  soft  influence  of 
peace. 

Militarists  have  answered  that  universal  military 
training  accounts  for  this  unexpected  hardness. 
Frenchmen,   Germans   and   Italians   had  been   edu- 


ii8  THE  NEXT  WAR 

cated  for  war,  taught  to  think  from  their  infancy 
in  terms  of  war;  and  we  are  dealing  with  a  state  of 
mind.  Then  what  about  the  British?  The  island  of 
Britain  had  protected  herself  by  navies,  not  armies. 
Her  small  army  was  composed  of  volunteers.  The 
average  Englishman,  Scotchman,  Irishman  or 
Welshman  did  not  know  the  trigger  of  a  rifle  from 
the  muzzle.  He  had  never  thought  of  war  as  a  pos- 
sibility of  his  life.  When  Britain  took  to  the  draft, 
S'he  gathered  in  the  last  of  these  young  men,  ran 
them  through  four  or  five  months  of  intensive  train- 
ing, sent  them  to  the  line.  Generally  such  troops, 
as  one  might  expect,  were  inferior  to  the  veterans 
in  military  technique.  They  were  little  if  any  in- 
ferior in  "hardness."  I  saw  a  British  draft-division 
once  literally  staggering  back  to  the  rest-station.  It 
was  a  time  of  special  stress,  when  relief  divisions 
were  hard  to  find.  These  men  had  been  kept  in  the 
line  until  nearly  seventy  per  cent  of  their  original 
strength  was  gone  and  replaced.  Yet  they  had  held 
firm  to  the  end.  I  have  shown  how  modern  war- 
fare under  the  conscription  system  chooses  the  best, 
takes  their  activity  from  the  existing  generation, 
their  strong  blood  from  the  next  generation.  That 
is  your  true  softening  process.  Nations  do  not  grow 
hard  through  wars  and  preparation  for  wars.  This 
is  another  thing  which  is  not  so,  but  only  seems  so. 
Armageddon  affords  proof  that  the  reverse  is  true. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  DISCIPLINE   OF    PEACE 

All  this  leads  up  to  the  question  of  the  moral 
factor  in  general  military  preparation — whether 
peace-time  conscription  or  universal  military  train- 
ing. Is  it  useful  only  as  a  means  of  national  defence, 
or  has  it  a  real  value  for  the  general  purposes  of 
society?  The  militarists  say  that  it  has.  To  begin 
with,  it  inculcates  obedience,  and  the  instinct  of 
discipline.  It  spreads  the  habits  of  civilization 
among  the  masses.  It  takes  boys  with  round  shoul- 
ders, shuffling  gait,  uncleanly  ways,  lawless  manners, 
and  makes  them  straight,  upstanding,  clean,  orderly, 
obedient  men.  During  the  war,  they  showed  us 
photographs  of  these  awful  examples,  before  and 
after  taking. 

Now  it  is  true  that  tens  of  thousands  of  our 
young  men,  perhaps  hundreds  of  thousands,  were  so 
transformed  by  army  training.  But  we  must  con- 
sider averages,  not  exceptions.  Millions  of  others 
— certainly  the  great  majority — came  from  a  good, 
sound  American  environment.  All  of  them  in  their 
childhood,  most  of  them  in  their  youth,  had  prac- 
tised athletic  SDort  in  some  form.     They  presented 

119 


120  THE  NEXT  WAR 

themselves  to  the  drill-sergeant  with  fine,  well-de- 
veloped bodies.  They  knew  how  to  keep  themselves 
clean.  They  had  been  under  the  tight  discipline  of 
the  modern  world  from  the  moment  they  opened  a 
first  reader — in  school,  in  factory,  in  business.  And 
after  they  left  school,  it  was  a  kind  of  voluntary 
discipline  making,  it  seems  to  me,  for  higher  aims 
in  character  than  any  kind  of  involuntary  discipline. 
In  the  modern  world  as  contrasted  with  the  an- 
cient we  all  live  under  strict  discipline,  partly  self- 
imposed.  Every  morning,  the  reader  gets  up  and 
goes  at  a  set  hour  to  his  office  or  shop.  No  bugle 
wakes  him;  no  sergeant  barks  out  the  order  to  fall 
in  and  go  to  work.  If  he  grows  weary  of  getting 
up  at  six  or  seven,  he  has  only  to  quit  his  job.  He 
will  not  be  shot  or  jailed  or  publicly  disgraced  for 
that,  as  he  would  if  he  deserted  from  the  army.  To 
quit  the  job  might  hurt  his  career,  might  work 
privation  on  his  family — that  is  all.  Every  morning 
after  breakfast  I  sit  down  and  write.  Today,  there 
is  a  dog-show  in  town.  I  want  very  much  to  go.  I 
am  not  going,  because  I  have  too  much  work  to  do. 
So  I  hold  myself  to  writing — voluntarily.  Now 
both  the  reader  and  I  are  doing  a  thing,  it  seems  to 
me,  better  for  our  mortal  fibre  than  as  though  the 
bugle  blew  us  out  of  bed  and  the  sergeant,  backed 
by  the  whole  force  of  the  United  States  government, 
ordered  us  to  work.  It  is  self-discipline,  self-con- 
trol, as  contrasted  with  external  discipline,  external 
control.     The  modern  world  requires  always  more 


THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  PEACE        121 

and  more  of  this  kind  of  discipline.  That  is  one 
reason  for  the  unexpected  hardness  and  valor  of  all 
European  and  American  troops  in  the  late  war — 
forty  years  of  the  discipline  of  peace. 

The  Germans  showed  the  way  to  the  perfect 
"psychological  preparation."  Its  main  object, 
though  not  its  sole  one,  is  perfectly  to  overcome  the 
natural  fear  of  death.  The  Italian  peasants  of  the 
ancient  Roman  army,  it  is  said,  fought  so  valiantly 
partly  because  the  men  feared  their  officers  more 
than  they  did  the  enemy.  We  have  found  another 
and  more  scientific  way — the  power  of  habit.  Take 
a  man  and  accustom  him  to  obedience,  instant  and 
unquestioned,  in  every  act  of  his  life.  To  obey  be- 
comes in  time  a  fixed  habit,  almost  an  obsession. 
The  moment  arrives  when  he  must  obey  the  whistle 
or  the  officer's  command,  and  advance  to  probable 
death.  Personal  pride,  fear  of  the  disgraceful  con- 
sequences in  refusal,  love  of  country,  even  sense  of 
adventure,  urge  him  forward  of  course;  just  as  the 
natural  shrinking  from  pain  and  death  hold  him 
back.  But  the  governing  factor  in  the  perfect  sol- 
dier is  the  ingrained  habit  of  instant,  unquestioning 
obedience.  He  goes  because  his  very  nervous  re- 
flexes tell  him  that  he  must. 

I  cannot  find  that  in  the  old  days  of  chivalrous 
warfare  conscious  hate  played  much  part  in  the 
training  of  a  soldier.  The  ideal — imperfectly  felt 
and  realized,  but  still  an  ideal — was  the  generous, 
adventurous  warrior  who  hated  his  enemy  perhaps, 


122  THE  NEXT  WAR 

but  who  spared  him,  too.  "Brave  as  a  lion,  gentle 
as  a  woman."  The  Germans  showed  that  there  was 
a  more  useful  method.  "The  best  soldier  is  a  bit  of 
a  brute,"  they  said.  In  our  military  schools,  we 
have  always  forbidden  hazing.  The  German  mili- 
tary schools  encouraged  it,  in  forms  more  gross  than 
any  of  our  youth  imagined.  That  was  done  to  culti- 
vate the  required  touch  of  brutality.  In  the  close 
race  for  victory  of  the  last  war,  we  all  had  to  follow. 
Uninstructed  civilians,  visiting  the  American,  French 
and  British  training-camps,  wondered  at  the  time 
given  to  bayonet  practice.  They  knew  that  the 
bayonet  was  rarely  used  in  action.  Why  so  much 
stress  upon  it?  Any  sergeant  could  explain  that.  It 
was  a  means  of  cultivating  hate,  of  making  your 
soldier  a  bit  of  a  brute.  That  dummy  at  which  you 
were  thrusting — the  instructor  encouraged  you  to 
imagine  him  a  German,  to  curse  him,  to  work  up  a 
savage  delight  in  mutilating  him.  It  was  a  part  of 
the  higher  psychology  of  modern  war. 

There  was  propaganda,  too — and  here  I  must 
condense  a  theme  for  a  whole  book.  This  was  one 
of  the  human  forces  existing  before  the  great  war, 
which  the  war  reduced  to  its  scientific  terms;  made 
tremendously  usable.  It  was,  really,  our  contribu- 
tion. The  American  science  of  advertising  had 
shown  by  what  means  an  idea  may  best  be  implanted 
in  the  greatest  number  of  people.  With  all  the  press 
under  control,  the  European  Boards  of  Morale  and 
Bureaus  of  Propaganda  proceeded  with  conscious 


THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  PEACE        123 

purpose  to  put  into  every  people  a  mob-instinct  of 
hatred  for  the  enemy,  man,  woman  and  child.  Since 
everyone  who  has  a  pair  of  working  hands  is  useful 
to  the  purposes  of  a  modern  war,  the  hate-propa- 
ganda was  aimed  at  the  civilians  as  well  as  the  sol- 
diers. But  "keeping  up  morale"  in  the  army  was 
the  main  object.  Generating  hate  in  the  civilian 
population  made  toward  that  end.  If  the  soldier 
on  leave  heard  from  his  women,  his  father  and  his 
uncles  that  the  enemy  were  all  a  set  of  ruffians,  a 
race  which  had  nothing  in  common  with  the  human 
race,  it  made  him  a  better  hater  when  he  returned 
to  the  line.  Half-truth  was  the  best  tool  of  this 
propaganda;  but,  war  being  the  negation  of  all  ordi- 
nary morality,  the  propagandists  did  not  gag  at  lies. 
For  a  familiar  example,  there  is  the  story  about  the 
Germans  cutting  off  children's  hands  in  Belgium.  It 
was  not  true.  I  repeat  that  I  was  in  Belgium  during 
the  first  month  of  the  war;  that  there  were  German 
atrocities,  some  of  which  I  witnessed — atrocities 
committed  by  order,  for  the  strategic  purposes  of 
the  General  Staff — but  that  no  case  of  the  kind  I 
mention  was  ever  fully  proved.  Nevertheless  it  was 
a  popular  war-rumor  in  the  beginning;  it  had  all  the 
qualities  which  make  a  story  *'go."  It  was  taken 
up  by  the  propagandists,  spread  as  a  means  of  lash- 
ing up  hate  by  men  who  knew  better;  so  firmly  fixed 
in  the  public  mind  that  I  myself  have  but  lately  been 
called  "pro-German"  for  denying  it.  In  fairness, 
I  may  add  that  they  lied  more  grossly  in  Germany, 


124  THE  NEXT  WAR 

especially  when  the  case  grew  desperate.  There, 
cutting  off  women's  breasts  was  the  favorite  night- 
mare tale. 

This  hate-propaganda  failed  a  little  of  its  main 
purposes.  The  soldier  swallowed  it  less  avidly  than 
the  civilian  population.  If  you  wanted  a  tolerant 
view  of  the  enemy,  you  were  most  likely  to  get  it 
from  a  soldier  sitting  in  a  dugout  under  fire,  his  gas- 
mask at  the  alert.  If  you  wanted  to  hear  that  the 
enemy  was  a  creature  not  quite  human,  but  a  species 
of  gorilla  which  should  be  exterminated  to  the  last 
baby,  you  must  go  to  some  comfortable  home  in 
Paris  or  London — or  equally  I  suppose  in  Berlin. 
Indeed,  whole  elements  in  the  European  armies 
quietly  closed  their  minds  to  this  form  of  propa- 
ganda. British  officers  of  the  old  school,  for  exam- 
ple, tried  to  maintain  the  tradition  of  the  warrior 
chivalrous  even  in  his  thoughts.  It  was  a  conven- 
tionality of  most  British  headquarters  messes  not  to 
speak  ill  of  the  enemy.  If  the  civilian  visitor  intro- 
duced the  "hate-stuff"  into  the  conversation,  he  was 
answered  by  polite  denials  or  by  frigid  silence. 

All  this  must  be  changed  in  the  next  war.  You 
must  focus  your  hatred  where  it  is  most  useful  and 
needed — ^in  the  soldiers  at  the  front.  And  we  are 
studying  to  change  it.  The  propagandists  and 
boards  of  morale  are  working  and  experimenting 
like  the  chemists — coolly  reviewing  the  methods  and 
mistakes  of  the  last  war,  finding  new  methods  with- 
out mistakes. 


THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  PEACE        125 

Has  the  involuntary  discipline  of  armies  much  to 
do  with  the  voluntary  discipline  of  peace?  The 
aftermath  of  the  late  war  goes  to  prove  that  the 
relation  is  a  little  remote.  I  know  hundreds  of 
young  men — British,  French,  Belgian,  Italian,  Amer- 
ican— whom  the  war  seemed  to  have  spoiled  at  least 
temporarily  for  civilian  pursuits.  Accustomed  to  be 
disciplined  by  others,  they  seemed  to  have  lost  the 
habit  of  disciplining  themselves.  They  found  it 
difficult,  almost  impossible,  to  make  themselves  go 
to  work  at  regular  hours,  stick  to  any  one  job  or  any 
practical  object  very  long  at  a  time.  This  psycho- 
logical aftermath  of  the  war  we  all  know,  I  think. 
You  might  lay  it  all  to  the  actual  war — its  stresses 
and  excitements,  its  alternate  tense  action  and  idle- 
ness— were  it  not  that  we  find  the  same  state  of 
mind  in  young  Americans  who  were  mobilized  in  the 
draft,  had  their  year  and  a  half  of  army  training, 
and  never  got  abroad.  It  was  hard  to  **settle 
down";  which  means  that  it  was  hard  to  change 
from  imposed  discipline  to  self-discipline,  from  the 
regularity  of  army  life  to  the  fast,  irregular  compe- 
tition of  civilian  life. 

The  world  over,  we  found  that  the  hate-propa- 
ganda, the  conscious  effort  to  make  the  soldier  **a 
bit  of  a  brute"  had  long  effects.  Everywhere  were 
"crime  waves" — highway  robbery,  burglary,  sudden 
murders  of  passion.  Ours  was  perhaps  the  lightest 
of  all.  The  police  records  of  Berlin  in  19 19  read 
like  annals  of  the  old  days  of  Jack  Sheppard.    The 


126  THE  NEXT  WAR 

Belgian  police  were  forced,  for  the  first  time  since 
Barons  ruled  in  Flanders,  to  fight  organized  gangs 
of  bandits.  England  boasted  in  old  years  a  low 
murder  rate;  and  her  courts  had  a  swift  and  certain 
way  of  hanging  for  murder  without  regard  to  wealth 
or  social  rank.  "The  unwritten  law"  did  not  exist 
for  British  juries.  Just  after  the  war,  England  ex- 
perienced a  series  of  "murders  of  passion,"  by  ex- 
soldiers  and  ex-officers;  and  British  juries  acquitted 
the  murderers  as  lightly  as  once  did  Latin  judges. 
How  much  of  this  mentality  back  of  these  crime- 
waves  sprang  from  actual  experience  at  the  Front 
and  how  much  from  the  education  in  brutality  of  the 
new  military  training,  no  one  of  course  can  say. 
Doubtless  both  influences  bore  on  this  crime  wave. 

Here  in  America  and  abroad,  there  are  plans 
afoot  for  knitting  army  training  a  little  more  closely 
into  civilian  life.  Experts  on  physical  culture  have 
testified  that  drill  and  setting-up  exercises,  as  hith- 
erto practiced  by  armies,  give  an  imperfect  and  one- 
sided physical  development.  It  is  proposed  to  revise 
army  physical  training  on  modern  lines.  It  is  pro- 
posed, further,  to  teach  the  men,  while  they  are  in 
the  ranks,  the  elements  at  least  of  useful  civilian 
trades.  These  are  compromises,  at  best  designed  to 
reduce  the  ultimate  cost  of  armies  to  society,  at 
worst  sops  to  public  opinion.  The  chief  end  of 
military  training  is  to  teach  men  to  fight.  They 
must  be  drilled,  first  in  order  to  inculcate  the  instinct 
of  perfect  obedience  and  second  so  that  large  bodies 


THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  PEACE        127 

of  troops  may  be  moved  without  confusion.  They 
must  learn  to  use  weapons,  from  the  trench-grenade 
and  the  rifle  to  the  aeroplane  and  the  tank.  Most 
of  this  training,  from  the  point  of  view  of  ordinary, 
peace-time  industry,  is  wasted.  One  of  the  chief 
economic  losses  in  military  training  is  the  time  and 
energy  it  takes  from  the  most  teachable  years  of  best 
young  men.  It  will  be  "war  by  machinery"  in  fu- 
ture; and  those  told  off  for  the  higher  functions  of 
war — such  as  tanks,  aeroplanes  and  gas — will  get,  it 
is  true,  a  certain  training  in  mechanics  and  chemistry. 
But  in  just  as  much  as  these  devices  differ  from  the 
devices  of  peace,  in  just  so  much  will  the  training 
be  wasted,  socially  and  economically. 


CHAPTER  XI 


"defensive  preparation" 


What  should  be  our  American  attitude  toward 
military  preparation?  The  average  hard-headed, 
practical  American  will  perhaps  say  that  if  war  has 
grown  so  deadly,  it  is  all  the  more  reason  why  we 
should  prepare  to  defend  ourselves.  Without  de- 
fence, we  stand  in  peril  of  general  extinction;  with 
defence,  we  may  avert  war  at  least  for  a  time,  may 
soften  the  blow  when  it  comes.  Let  us  prepare 
then,  says  the  American  citizen,  not  for  conquest,  or 
"fulfilment  of  national  aspirations"  but  for  defence. 

Yes,  provided  only  that  we  can,  in  this  age  of 
confusions  and  complexities,  keep  our  military  prep- 
arations defensive.  And  that  is  extremely  difficult. 
Indeed,  when  you  come  to  thorough  defensive  prep- 
aration, a  hundred  per  cent  efficient,  it  becomes 
perhaps  impossible.  The  term  "defence"  needs  de- 
fining; it  has  hitherto  been  used  as  a  most  effective 
hypocrisy  of  militarism.  Keeping  our  coasts  and 
borders  against  an  invading  enemy  is  pure  defence; 
no  one  disputes  that.  But  in  the  modern  world  a 
nation  is  not  confined  to  its  own  political  borders. 
The  American  mining  engineer  developing  a  lode 

128 


Money  approprieibed  by    the   llnitecL 
Sta.bes   for  Military  Preparedness 
before  and  after 
the  World  War. 


^35 


o 


g  (0 


1909- 
1910 


1920- 
1921 


ESTIMATES 
1921     -     1922 


"DEFENSIVE  PREPARATIQN"        131 

for  the  Ameer  of  Afghanistan  is  a  part  of  America, 
just  like  the  mining  engineer  driving  a  tunnel  in 
Colorado.  At  this  moment,  that  larger  America  is 
spreading.  There  is  a  new  movement  in  world- 
industry.  Instead  of  bringing  the  raw  material  to 
the  power,  men  are  beginning  to  bring  the  power  to 
the  raw  material,  India  raises  much  first-rate  cot- 
ton; she  has  also  inexhaustible  resources  of  labor. 
Hitherto,  she  has  sold  the  raw  cotton  to  England, 
where  the  coal  is;  now,  India  is  going  to  spin  and 
weave  part  of  this  cotton  beside  her  own  fields, 
partly  with  native  water-power,  partly  with  im- 
ported coal.  We  have  the  money  of  the  world;  and 
American  capital  has  been  flowing  by  hundreds  of 
millions  into  such  projects  as  this.  If  we  are  to  have 
the  perfect  defence,  we  must  prepare  to  back  up 
American  citizens  and  "American  interests"  in  India 
as  well  as  in  Indiana,  in  New  Guinea  as  well  as  in 
New  York.  It  is  hard,  it  is  almost  impossible,  to 
draw  the  line;  so  we  are  pulled  insensibly  into  the 
old,  vicious  circle. 

There  comes  a  point  in  any  thorough  military 
preparation  when  the  spirit  of  defence  runs  subtly 
into  the  spirit  of  offence.  Again,  Germany  is  the 
typical  case.  She  was,  her  emperors,  kings  and  gen- 
erals said,  "ringed  with  foes."  That,  in  the  begin- 
ning, was  not  an  entirely  insincere  presentation  of 
the  case.  On  one  side  lay  France,  smarting  with 
the  injustice  of  1870;  on  another  lay  the  barbaric 
Russia  of  the  Czars,  with  double  Germany's  man- 


132  THE  NEXT  WAR 

power  and  an  eye  on  Germany's  developed  wealth. 
On  her  seacoast  lay  the  strong  British  Navy. 
"What  is  Germany?"  asked  question  i  in  the  public 
school  catechism  on  geography,  "It  is  your  Father- 
land, entirely  surrounded  by  enemies."  Militarism 
was  hammered  into  the  German  people  in  the  form 
of  defence,  defence,  always  defence.  And  let  me 
repeat;  in  the  beginning  the  men  who  urged  this 
were  not  all  insincere. 

Germany  went  into  the  game  of  financial  imperial- 
ism with  the  rest.  The  world  was  spotted  with 
"spheres  of  influence,"  where  German  capital  har- 
vested fields  of  trade  or  raw  materials  for  the  fac- 
tories of  Berlin,  Leipsic,  Diisseldorf.  These  inter- 
ests must  be  protected;  other  capital  must  be  kept 
out.  The  German  army  began  to  pass  from  a  de- 
fensive force  to  an  implied  offensive  force.  In  such 
crises  as  the  transfer  of  Bosnia  and  Herzegovina, 
the  Germans  won  because  the  Kaiser  rattled  his 
sword  and  the  others  yielded  for  fear  he  might  turn 
loose  his  perfect  army. 

There  came,  too,  a  mental  change.  "He  who 
forges  the  sword  will  want  to  wield  it."  Here  is  one 
of  the  ways  in  which  a  national  mind  works  like  an 
individual  mind.  You  have  found,  we  will  say,  that 
you  play  an  extraordinary  game  of  lawn  tennis.  You 
will  not  long  be  satisfied  with  scrub  games.  You 
will  want,  if  you  are  a  normal  man,  to  enter  tour- 
naments, to  prove  your  accomplishment  and  su- 
periority before  the  world.    You  discover  that  you 


"DEFENSIVE  PREPARATION"        133 

write  good  poetry  or  fiction.  How  long  will  you 
be  contented  with  sugared  sonnets  among  your  pri- 
vate friends?  Sooner  or  later  you  will  want  to 
publish  it  and  let  the  world  see  how  clever  you  are. 
And  so  when  you  have  the  perfect  army  or  navy, 
perfectly  knit  into  the  structure  of  the  state,  you 
will  find  some  impulse  which  you  may  not  at  the 
time  analyze,  urging  you  toward  its  proof  in  action. 

Germany  did.  There  was  never  such  a  glittering 
display  of  military  power  as  in  the  old  summer  ma- 
noeuvres before  the  war.  Doubtless  any  German 
who  saw  that  great  charge  of  massed  cavalry  by 
which  they  always  ended,  felt  somewhere  in  him  a 
glow  as  he  thought  of  what  Germany  might  do  in 
real  battle.  The  cloud  gathered.  With  Germany — 
as  even  most  Germans  now  admit — lay  the  decision 
for  peace  or  war;  and  she  chose  war.  It  is  absurd 
to  blame  the  Kaiser  alone;  almost  equally  absurd  to 
blame  his  counsellors  alone.  They  were  carried 
along,  all  of  them,  by  a  flood  which  had  been  rolling 
up  in  Germany  for  forty  years. 

Yet  even  then,  they  maintained  the  fiction  to  their 
people — and  half  to  themselves — that  they  were 
fighting  a  defensive  war  against  the  "ring  of  foes." 
The  average  German  soldier  whom  I  saw  in  Bel- 
gium during  19 14  believed  this  devoutly.  Barbarous 
Russia  and  envious  England  had  attacked  the 
Fatherland.  He  fought  in  her  defence.  France 
must  be  crushed  because  she  had  foolishly  joined 
these  major  enemies.    Poor  France!    Now,  if  they 


134  THE  NEXT  WAR 

survive,  these  same  Germans  are  calling  France  the 
source  of  all  their  woes,  the  true  enemy.  For  the 
current  is  running  in  another  direction,  and  the 
strategy  of  propaganda  has  changed.  But  this  is  a 
digression.  Germany  illustrates,  among  other 
things,  the  danger  in  the  perfect  defensive  prepara- 
tion and  the  difficulty  of  drawing  the  line  between 
defence  and  offence. 

Some  may  note  that  I  have  not  touched  upon  the 
question  of  national  honor.  The  individual  in  so- 
ciety sometimes  meets  a  situation  outside  the  law  so 
intolerable  that  he  is  less  than  a  man  if  he  does  not 
take  the  law  into  his  own  hands;  and  so  it  is  with 
nations.  The  circumstance  which  drew  us  into  the 
Great  War  was  an  unusually  clean-cut  example  of  an 
unpardonable  affront.  Germany  had  announced 
cold-bloodedly,  flatly,  that  American  vessels  could 
no  longer  sail  the  most  frequented  seas  of  the  world; 
if  they  did,  the  hulls  would  be  destroyed,  the  crews 
killed  without  warning.  The  occasions  of  war  are 
not  commonly  so  simple  as  this.  "National  honor" 
is  more  often  the  excuse  for  economic  and  political 
interests,  or  the  mere  focus  of  trouble  arising  from 
a  conflict  of  such  interests.  The  occasion  of  the 
Great  War,  the  spark  which  set  the  mine,  was  the 
assassination  of  an  Austrian  prince  in  Serbia.  Be- 
hind that  lay  thirty  or  forty  years  of  intrigue  lead- 
ing up  to  a  "situation."  Austria  wanted  to  make 
Serbia  a  vassal  economically,  and  in  the  end  politi- 


"DEFENSIVE  PREPARATION"        135 

cally.  Germany  wanted  to  extend  a  "line  of 
influence"  through  the  Balkans  in  order  to  build  an 
all-German  Berlin-to-Bagdad  railway.  The  Entente 
nations  wanted  to  prevent  all  this.  Had  no  such 
situation  lain  behind  the  assassination  at  Sarajevo, 
the  matter  would  have  been  settled  with  an  apology, 
punishment  of  the  criminals  and  perhaps  indemnity. 

Let  us  imagine  another  case.  Mr.  Colby,  then 
our  Secretary  of  State,  visited  South  America  in 
1920.  Suppose  that  in  Rio  de  Janeiro  some  fanatic 
or  band  of  fanatics  had  murdered  him.  Would  that 
have  led  to  war  between  the  United  States  and 
Brazil?  Almost  certainly  no.  But  suppose  that 
Brazil  and  the  United  States  had  long  been  engaged 
in  an  economic  and  political  struggle  to  control  by 
their  capital  the  resources  of  Ecuador,  Colombia  and 
Central  America.  Suppose  them  both  prepared  to 
the  last  belt-buckle.  Would  it  then  have  led  to  war? 
Almost  certainly  yes.  And  most  Americans  would 
say — as  did  the  Austrians  in  19 14 — that  we  were 
drawing  the  sword  to  avenge  national  honor  and 
wipe  out  an  intolerable  insult. 

Building  up  armies,  navies,  and  munitions  indus- 
tries solely  through  the  fear  of  national  insult,  solely 
to  protect  honor,  seems  a  little  like  carrying  a  loaded 
pistol  night  and  day  lest  perhaps  someone  insult  you 
intolerablv,  beyond  recourse  of  law. 

Yet  the  fact  remains:  few  Americans  of  spirit  will 
want,  in  this  era  of  the  world,  to  strip  us  of  all  our 
defences.    That  goes  beyond  the  reasonable  pacifism 


136  THE  NEXT  WAR 

which  has  hitherto  been  the  general  American  atti- 
tude toward  war.  It  becomes  the  non-resistance  of 
the  dreamer,  Tolstoi.  Apart  from  its  danger, 
completely  laying  down  our  own  arms  would  be  no 
good,  except  by  example.  We  must  reach  further 
back  than  that  into  the  structure  of  things;  try,  with 
all  the  others,  to  repair  this  world-machine.  At 
present,  it  is  like  some  great,  complex  engine  which 
5ias  broken  a  vital  part.  It  tends  to  beat  itself  to 
pieces  with  its  own  power. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  DRAMATIC   MOMENT 

Now  is  the  appointed  time  to  begin  action,  and 
we  are  the  appointed  people.  The  lesson  of  the  last 
war  is  still  fresh  in  mind;  and  unto  us,  by  luck  rather 
than  our  own  foresight,  has  been  given  the  dominat- 
ing position  in  the  world  of  the  next  quarter-century. 
The  course  which  the  United  States  chooses  will 
largely  be  the  course  of  the  other  nations. 

It  is  the  appointed  time  for  still  another  reason, 
less  obvious,  no  less  compelling.  All  old,  imperfect 
human  institutions  have  their  uses  in  their  period; 
then  that  usefulness  passes  and  we  must  rid  our- 
selves of  them.  Monarchy  in  its  absolute  form 
served  the  development  of  humanity.  The  half- 
civilized  man  could  not  grasp  conceptions  so  ab- 
stract as  his  relation  and  his  duty  toward  other  men 
in  his  group  or  clan  or  nation.  He  needed  a  visible, 
personal  representation  of  power.  So  was  built  up 
loyalty;  from  loyalty  grew  the  fine  sentiment  of 
patriotism;  from  patriotism  the  sense  of  team-work 
in  society.  Then  monarchy  was  outworn.  We 
sloughed  it  off,  at  first  in  its  absolute  form,  then 
faster  and  faster  in  any  form  at  all.     Slav^ery  may 

137 


138  THE  NEXT  WAR 

hav^e  been  necessary  to  build  up  the  habit  of  steady 
work  among  tribes  and  nations.  Races  learned  the 
habit  of  steady  work,  and  sloughed  off  slavery. 

War  on  the  whole  was  long  useful  to  humanity — 
expensive,  but  the  best  way  we  had.  I  have  pre- 
viously quoted  Wells  to  show  how  it  drew  races 
into  the  circle  of  progress.  Long  before  there  was 
history  even  in  popular  ballad,  some  genius  in  some 
tribe  of  the  Asiatic  steppes  invented  the  wheel.  His 
tribe  went  to  war  and  won  or  lost — that  does  not 
matter.  Before  the  war  was  over,  the  enemy  had 
seen  the  wheel,  learned  its  usefulness,  was  making 
wheels  of  his  own.  But  for  war,  outlying  tribes  on 
the  fringe  of  humanity  might  have  skidded  their 
heavy  burdens  along  the  ground  for  centuries  and 
aeons.  At  the  end  of  the  Stone  Age,  some  savage 
discovered  that  tin  and  copper,  thrown  into  the  fire, 
melted,  blended,  produced  a  substance  which  could 
be  hammered  to  a  fine,  sharp  edge — a  tool  much 
better  than  any  chipped  stone.  He  used  his  bronze 
knife  in  war;  the  enemy  felt  its  edge,  admired,  pene- 
trated the  secret,  passed  it  on  by  war  to  tribes  still 
further  outlying.  So  we  progressed  from  the  Stone 
Age  to  the  age  of  metals. 

War,  too,  worked  with  monarchism  to  develop 
what  scholars  call  the  group-consciousness.  It 
stirred  up  in  men  a  fine,  high,  human  emotion  for 
the  humanity  outside  themselves.  The  average  man 
in  all  times  and  all  nations  up  to  the  eighteenth  and 


THE  DRAMATIC  MOMENT  139 

nineteenth  centuries  led  an  extremely  limited  life. 
Of  his  own  motion,  he  seldom  stirred  from  his  own 
domain  or  farm  or  village.  War  alone  drew  him 
out  to  teach  him  that  there  was  a  world  beyond  his 
horizon,  that  there  were  other  men  with  other  ideas 
not  only  among  his  own  people  but  among  stranger 
clans.  War  made  a  tremendous  contribution  to  hu- 
man experience,  to  collective  human  consciousness. 
That  was  its  use,  its  larger  reason  for  being. 

Now,  modern  invention  has  changed  all  that. 
We  no  longer  need  a  process  so  essentially  wasteful 
to  transmit  the  results  of  progress.  When  Wright 
proved  to  Europe  that  a  man  can  fly  through  the 
air,  the  news  was  flashed  that  very  night  to  every 
corner  of  the  globe;  three-quarters  of  the  civilized 
world  read  it  next  morning.  Within  a  month,  such 
remote  points  as  Shanghai,  Cape  Town  and  Buenos 
Aires  had  European  publications  with  technical  re- 
ports; any  good  mechanic  who  wished  could  go 
about  building  an  aeroplane.  The  remote  parts  of 
the  globe  were  by  now  coming  fast  into  the  circle  of 
communication.  Before  the  Great  War,  all  the  in- 
accessible places  had  been  explored — even  Thibet 
and  the  two  poles.  The  world  had  no  more  secrets 
and  mysteries.  From  end  to  end  of  Africa,  the 
infant  continent,  ran  a  railroad;  Africa  was  spotted 
with  European  settlements,  in  touch  with  civilization 
by  telegraph-lines.  The  printing-press,  the  railroad, 
the  automobile,  the  electric  telegraph  have  all  given 


HO  THE  NEXT  WAR 

their  part  toward  the  intensity  of  modern  war;  yet 
at  the  same  time  they  have  removed  one  of  its  su- 
preme necessities  for  being.  As  for  its  other  use — 
instilling  Into  men  the  sense  of  a  duty  toward  his 
country  or  his  group — that  work  also  Is  done.  In 
fact,  when  one  considers  the  conceited,  excessive, 
Jingo  patriotism  of  most  races  and  nations,  it  be- 
comes a  question  whether  it  Is  not  too  well  done. 

We  cannot  say  at  what  precise  moment  In  history 
monarchism  and  slavery  proved  themselves  out- 
worn, past  their  usefulness;  became  not  benevolent 
organs  but  dangerous  rudiments — like  a  vermiform 
appendix — In  the  body  politic.  But  war,  always 
picturesque,  died  its  spiritual  death  dramatically. 
We  may  say  with  certainty  I  think  that  it  proved 
itself  outworn  during  that  little  moment  of  history 
between  1914-18.  It  was  of  no  more  use  in  spread- 
ing progress,  of  little  more  use  In  building  up  the 
sense  of  collective  duty.  And  In  Itself  it  suddenly 
became  dangerous,  sordid,  disturbing  beyond  the 
imagination  of  devils. 

Two  great  tasks  He  before  humanity  In  the  rest 
of  the  twentieth  century.  One  Is  to  put  under 
control  of  true  morals  and  of  democracy  the  great 
power  of  human  production  which  came  In  the 
nineteenth  century.  The  other  Is  to  check,  to 
limit  and  finally  to  eliminate  the  institution  of  war. 
This  last  Is  the  more  important.  We  may  stagger 
on,  and  make  progress  even,  though  the  Industrial 
and  financial  structure  remains  as  It  is — we  were 


THE  DRAMATIC  MOMENT  141 

doing  very  well,  on  the  whole,  before  19 14.  But 
if  war  goes  on  unchecked,  following  its  present 
tendencies,  it  means  the  elimination  of  whole  races 
— always  the  best  races — and  the  downfall  of  civ- 
ilization. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

PROPOSED   WAYS   TO    PEACE 

Perhaps  we  cannot  eliminate  war.  It  seems  so 
deeply  rooted  in  human  institutions !  It  is  so  easy 
to  stir  up  hate,  so  hard  to  create  understandings! 
Thus,  in  the  late  eighteenth  century,  the  republican 
must  have  felt  about  the  elimination  of  Icings.  The 
institution  of  monarchy  appeared  unassailable — the 
task  seemed  at  times  hopeless.  And  surely  we 
cannot,  unless  we  work  up  the  zeal  of  those  early 
republicans,  make  reasonable  pacifism  a  governing 
motive  in  our  political  thinking  and  action. 

Yet  this  reasonable  pacifism  had  made  progress, 
even  before  the  late  war.  Peace,  all  the  reference 
books  will  tell  you,  had  in  the  nineteenth  century 
cast  off  its  old  negative  meaning  and  taken  on  a 
positive  meaning.  It  was  no  longer  regarded  simply 
as  the  rest  between  wars;  it  was  an  end  in  itself. 
The  Hague  Conferences,  powerless  as  they  were  to 
prevent  either  the  great  war  or  its  barbarities,  still 
showed  that  a  great  part  of  humanity  wanted  peace, 
would  take  much  trouble  to  get  it.  We,  by  our 
relations  with  Latin  America,  proved  how  two  conti- 
nents might  live  in  practical  harmony.    When  Secre- 

142 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        143 

tary  of  State  Blaine  called  the  first  conference  with 
Latin  America,  he  set  up  a  milestone  on  the  road  to 
permanent  peace. 

So  strong  indeed  had  become  this  desire  and  hope 
among  most  Western  European  nations  that  the 
very  militarists  among  the  Allies  were  forced  dur- 
ing the  late  war  to  use  the  phrase  "the  war  against 
war"  in  order  to  keep  up  the  fighting  spirit  among 
their  people.  And  when  the  war  was  over,  the  at- 
tempt to  form  a  League  of  Nations  afforded  still 
another  proof.  I  shall  not  enter  into  the  late  con- 
troversy. But  the  League  was  the  work  of  politi- 
cians, all  responsible  to  democracies  for  their  jobs. 
They  would  never  have  made  the  attempt  had  they 
not  believed  that  it  would  be  popular. 

The  Peace  of  Versailles,  imperfect  though  it  may 
have  been,  proved  in  other  ways  how  far  we  had 
moved  beyond  old  conceptions  of  national  glory. 
After  former  wars,  the  conquerors  usually  took  over 
without  shame  the  territory  of  the  conquered,  no 
matter  how  the  inhabitants  felt.  Even  as  late  as 
1 87 1,  the  neutrals  did  not  protest  officially  and  but 
very  little  unofficially  when  Germany  seized  the  un- 
willing Alsace-Lorraine.  But  in  the  Peace  of  Ver- 
sailles, European  statesmen  had  to  give  at  least 
lip-service  to  the  principle  that  no  nation  or  no  part 
of  a  nation  may  permanently  be  held  by  a  conqueror 
against  the  will  of  the  inhabitants.  Again :  they  did 
this  because  they  were  politicians,  and  had  satisfied 
themselves  that  a  new  moral  consciousness  In  man- 


144  THE  NEXT  WAR 

kind  demanded  a  new  conception  of  national  rights 
and  met-hods. 

Back  from  the  war  came  the  plain  men  of  the 
democracies  old  and  new — thirty  or  forty  millions 
of  them.  The  greater  part  of  them,  and  especially 
the  thinking  part,  had  been  quarreling  in  their 
thoughts  with  the  institution  of  war.  If  our  re- 
turned soldiers  felt  this  less  than  their  European 
comrades,  it  was  because  they  had  borne  a  shorter 
strain  and  had  needed  less  of  the  propaganda  of 
peace  through  war  to  keep  up  their  morale.  The 
Societe  des  Anciens  Combatants  in  France  corre- 
sponds to  our  American  Legion.  Lodge  after  lodge 
of  that  society  In  19 19  passed  a  resolution  saying 
that  their  real  object  now  Is  "la  guerre  a  la  guerre" 
(war  against  war).  The  rumor,  spread  by  gov- 
ernments as  a  feeler,  that  the  British  and  French 
armies  were  going  to  Russia  to  fight  the  BolshevikI 
produced  Instant  riots  and  mutinies.  I  witnessed 
the  Ruhr  Rebellion  of  April,  1920,  in  Germany. 
Now  while  this  revolt  was  stirred  up  by  the  Com- 
munists, the  average  Ruhr  Insurgent,  I  found,  was 
out  primarily  to  end  militarism.  "If  those  soldiers 
have  their  own  way,"  said  the  men  of  the  Ruhr, 
"we'll  be  fighting  the  French  again  In  two  years. 
We  don't  want  any  more  wars." 

Yet  so  strange  are  these  times  that  governments, 
supposed  to  be  the  expression  of  peoples,  emerged 
from  the  Peace  of  Versailles  more  nationalistic, 
perhaps  more  belligerent,   than  ever  before.     Na- 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        145 

tlonalism,  the  denial  of  peace,  is  running  riot.  Those 
returned  soldiers,  with  all  their  pacifist  sentiment, 
find  themselves  like  the  rest  of  humanity  caught  in 
a  wheel.  Jean  the  Frenchman  does  not  want  any 
more  war.  But  the  North  lies  devastated;  until  the 
fields  of  the  Somme  are  bearing  again,  the  chimneys 
of  Picardy  smoking,  his  shop  will  never  do  good 
business.  Hans  the  miner  of  the  Ruhr  district  got 
out  his  army  Mauser  last  year  and  tried  to  shoot 
a  reactionary  ofl'icer  in  order  to  show  that  he  wanted 
no  more  war.  But  Hans  believes  that  the  indemnity 
which  France  wants  is  excessive;  he  knows  that  if 
Germany  pays  it,  he  himself  will  have  lower  wages 
and  higher  taxes  all  his  life.  So  Jean  and  Hans  put 
their  interests  into  the  hands  of  the  strong  men  of 
Europe — men  with  the  old  ideas,  men  whose  con- 
ception of  statesmanship  is  force  unlimited.  *'His 
only  scheme  of  politics,"  said  an  American  diplomat 
of  an  eminent  European  confrere,  "is  'send  a  di- 
vision. 

The  pacifism  of  the  returned  European  soldier,  of 
the  disgusted  but  submerged  European  civilian,  is  a 
somewhat  abnormal  state  of  mind.  It  resembles  a 
little  the  psychology  of  a  religious  revival.  Not 
even  the  most  enthusiastic  revivalist  expects  that 
his  people  will  maintain  permanently  all  those 
heights  of  fervor  and  virtue  to  which  he  has  raised 
them.  The  wise  church  is  the  one  which  consoli- 
dates its  gains;  makes  the  revival  or  mission  yield 
permanent  fruit  in  sober,  day-by-day  piety,  unselfish- 


146  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ness  and  good  living.  If  we  let  this  moment  pass, 
the  nations  will  forget.  The  memories  of  the  hor- 
rors, the  destructions,  the  follies  of  Armageddon  will 
die  out  as  its  debts  are  paid  off,  as  the  new  gener- 
ation grows  up;  and,  as  in  old  wars,  only  the  sou- 
venirs of  its  glories  will  remain. 

Now,  I  repeat,  is  the  appointed  time  to  consoli- 
date what  Armageddon  won  for  peace,  and  we,  both 
actually  and  potentially  the  strongest  nation  of  the 
world,  are  the  appointed  people. 

Along  what  practical  lines  may  we  proceed? 

Doubtless  accumulated  experience,  translated  into 
policies  and  action  by  men  of  genius,  and  leadership 
will  find  us  new  ways.  But  here  are  the  courses  of 
possible  action  on  which  many  are  thinking  at  pres- 
ent and  a  few  working: 

First  and  most  drastically,  we  may  create  a  real 
law,  not  a  mere  set  of  gentlemen's  agreements  be- 
tween nation  and  nation.  That  is  the  kernel  of  the 
matter. 

Law  is  the  set  of  agreements,  backed  up  by  some 
kind  of  force,  to  prevent  murder  and  theft  and  in- 
justice between  the  individuals  of  a  tribe  or  a  state. 
In  the  savage  beginning  of  things,  men  probably 
killed  whomsoever  they  wished,  took  whatsoever 
they  desired.  But  people  could  not  get  along  and 
make  progress  on  that  plan.  An  individual  with  the 
fighting  endowments  of  a  Jack  Dempsey  had  it  all 
his  own  way.  Before  long,  men  got  together  and 
drew  up  primary  rules  of  the  human  game.     You 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        147 

kept,  we  will  say,  the  stone  knife  which  you  had 
chipped  for  yourself.  No  one  might  take  it  from 
you  except  he  give  an  equivalent;  no  one  might  kill 
you  except  with  certain  definite  excuses.  It  was  fur- 
ther agreed  that  whoever  broke  this  rule  should  be 
punished  by  the  collective  action  of  all  the  rest.  No 
one  man  could  thrash  the  Jack  Dempsey  of  the  tribe  ; 
but  two  or  three  men  could,  much  more  the  whole 
tribe.  That  was  the  beginning  of  law  and  order — 
an  understanding  as  to  the  rules  of  the  game,  an 
agreement  to  punish  whoever  broke  those  rules. 
Wise  old  David  Lubin  used  to  say  that  he  believed 
this  was  also  the  beginning  of  morals.  And  indeed, 
even  if  there  was  in  primitive  man  some  Inbred  sense 
of  kindness  and  of  property  right,  that  feeling  never 
expressed  Itself  In  action  until  men  drew  up  rules 
and  agreed  to  back  them  by  force. 

Nearly  everyone  who  thinks  must  have  wondered 
at  times  why  It  Is  supremely  wrong  to  kill  a  fellow 
citizen  in  time  of  peace,  supremely  right  to  kill  a 
foreigner  In  time  of  war;  why  lying  and  deceit, 
despicable  when  used  against  your  fellow-country- 
man, become  noble  when  used  against  your  national 
enemy,  I  have  explained  the  reason.  As  soon  as 
we  organized  states  and  tribes,  we  began  to  endow 
them  with  a  personality,  to  give  them  a  being.  And 
between  these  beings  the  law  did  not  run.  They 
had  never  got  together,  to  draw  up  rules  of  the 
game  and  provide  penalties  against  the  violators  of 
this  code  of  morals.    Consequently,  there  were  real- 


148  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ly  no  morals  between  states.  If  in  times  of  peace 
nations  refrained  from  murdering  the  citizens  of 
other  nations,  from  seizing  their  property,  that  was 
because  they  feared  the  disagreeable  consequences 
involved  in  these  acts.  It  was,  again,  like  the  state 
of  primitive  society  before  men  made  laws  and  or- 
ganized a  police  force.  When  one  primitive  man 
respected  his  neighbor's  property,  it  was  because  he 
did  not  care  to  get  into  a  fight.  The  process  was 
too  disagreeable;  it  was  not  worth  while.  But 
when  his  desire  grew  greater  than  his  fears  or  when 
his  blood  was  heated,  he  took  or  killed  with  at  best 
only  a  vague  sense  of  moral  wrong. 

But  finally,  when  the  law  within  nations  became 
so  perfectly  established  that  murder,  theft  and  arson 
grew  uncommon,  sporadic,  it  was  as  though  the 
reservoir  of  morals  filled  up  and  began  to  flow  over 
the  dams  dividing  nations.  Diplomats  and  others 
who  represented  sovereign  states  went  on  lying,  de- 
ceiving, committing  daily  in  peace  or  war  acts  which, 
performed  by  one  citizen  of  a  state  against  another, 
would  have  been  punished  by  ostracism,  jail  or  the 
gallows.  And  they  justified  themselves  to  them- 
selves and  their  fellow-citizens  because  it  was  done 
for  the  flag,  the  Patrie,  the  Fatherland.  The  cause 
sweetened  any  method.  But  public  opinion  concern- 
ing some  of  these  methods  grew  so  strong  as  to  force 
these  gentlemen  at  least  to  hypocrisy.  Since  the 
state  knows  no  morals  in  its  relation  with  other 
states,  a  treaty  used  to  be  a  sort  of  temporary  agree- 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE       149 

ment  for  temporary  advantage.  You  kept  it  be- 
cause it  did  not  suit  your  convenience  to  break  it. 
If  a  treaty  became  no  longer  convenient  to  one 
party  or  the  other — well,  kings  used  to  tear  up 
treaties  and  feel  very  little  necessity  for  apology  or 
explanation.  When  Germany  violated  one  of  her 
most  solemn  treaties  and  invaded  Belgium,  she 
broke,  really,  no  moral  law.  Do  not  believe  that 
the  cynical  diplomats  of  the  Entente  Allies  blamed 
her  in  their  hearts.  But  peoples  did  blame  her. 
The  moral  sense  of  individuals  the  world  over  rose 
against  such  an  act;  a  man  who  behaved  in  this  way 
counted  himself  out  of  society;  why  not  a  nation, 
too?  The  one  fact  which  German  propaganda  could 
never  explain  away  was  the  invasion  of  Belgium;  it 
is  perhaps  the  spiritual  reason  why  Germany  lost 
the  war. 

So  we  have  already  the  moral  basis  for  law  be- 
tween nations;  at  present,  however,  it  is  a  force,  not 
a  power,  because  it  has  no  machinery  to  make  it 
useful.  It  is  like  the  potential  electricity  going  to 
waste  in  a  mountain  river.  This  force  will  not  be- 
come power,  will  not  turn  wheels,  run  railroads  and 
light  cities,  until  you  harness  it — create  for  it  some 
machinery. 

We  shall  not  strike  at  the  root  of  wars  until  we 
organize  fifty  or  sixty  sovereign  nations  and  self- 
governing  colonies  of  the  world  somewhat  as  we  or- 
ganize individuals  in  a  tribe  or  state  or  nation.  In 
plain,  human  terms,   they  must  get  together,   pass 


150  THE  NEXT  WAR 

laws  to  define  and  forbid  national  murder  and  na- 
tional burglary,  and  agree  to  punish,  with  their  col- 
lective force,  any  violator  of  that  law. 

The  punishment  need  not  wholly,  need  not  mainly, 
consist  in  physical  force.  The  discussions  preced- 
ing the  League  of  Nations  showed,  theoretically  at 
least,  that  a  general  economic  boycott  might  be  as 
effective  as  military  action.  This  follows  a  rule  of 
progress  in  human  society.  Once,  law  knew  only 
one  kind  of  penalty  for  crime — physical  action. 
The  criminal  was  killed  or  mutilated  or  flogged.  In 
the  eighteenth  century,  the  English  would  hang  a 
man  for  stealing  six  shillings.  We  have  done  away 
with  flogging  and  mutilation,  have  abolished  hang- 
ing except  for  the  gravest  crimes.  We  have  substi- 
tuted imprisonment  and  fine.  Think  it  out  and  you 
will  see  that  imprisonment  is  mostly  an  economic 
penalty,  as  a  fine  is  wholly  an  economic  penalty. 

This  book,  I  repeat,  is  not  a  plea  for  or  against 
the  existing  League  of  Nations.  Call  your  organi- 
zation a  League  of  Nations,  an  association  of  na- 
tions, a  Hague  Tribunal  "with  teeth  in  it" — call  it 
what  you  will,  organize  it  how  you  will.  This  is  the 
specific  for  the  disease  of  war.  But  while  we  wait 
for  this  inevitable  organization  to  form  and  to  be- 
come effective,  we  may  use  a  few  pain-killers  and 
poultices. 

Among  these,  the  most  important  is  disarmament 
— a  pressing,  vital  question  of  the  moment.  Behind 
the  present   agitation   lies   a   compelling   economic 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE       151 

motive.  Europe  cannot  recover  If  she  goes  on  with 
the  old  race  for  armaments.  She  will  collapse  under 
the  double  burden.  The  world  is  so  interlocked 
that  if  Europe  blows  up  in  anarchy  we,  though  we 
hold  together,  must  suffer  terribly.  An  agreement 
to  limit  armies  and  navies  to  the  point  where  they 
cannot  be  used  aggressively  can  probably  be  en- 
forced. We  have  no  formal  law  between  nations, 
it  is  true;  but  that  uncharted  moral  opinion  of 
democracies  is  perhaps  powerful  enough  to  secure 
a  rough  working  agreement  until  we  get  something 
better.  It  cannot  be  done  without  the  consent — 
indeed  without  the  leadership — of  the  United  States. 
We  have  as  much  economic  and  industrial  power  to 
manufacture  navies  and  munitions  as  any  three 
European  nations,  more  population  to  furnish  sol- 
diers than  any  two  Western  European  nations.  If 
we  arm  to  the  teeth,  the  rest  must  follow  through 
fear. 

Such  partial  disarmament  will  serve  not  only  as 
temporary  alleviation;  It  will  be  also  in  the  nature 
of  a  remedy.  Whatever  movement  sets  the  nations 
thinking  positively  about  peace,  whatever  forces 
them  into  co-operation  instead  of  competition, 
makes  toward  their  final,  complete  understanding. 
Finally,  it  will  prevent  the  psychological  drift  to- 
ward war  which  comes  with  perfected  armaments. 

If  I  have  anywhere  made  it  appear  that  the  term 
"militarist"  is  equivalent  to  the  term  "professional 
soldier,"   I   have  done  the  military  clan  a  wrong. 


152  THE  NEXT  WAR 

Only  lately  our  two  most  eminent  soldiers,  Bliss  and 
Pershing,  have  come  out  flatly  for  a  disarmament 
program.  They  admit  that  it  will  not  be  easy;  and 
no  more  will  it.  You  cannot  complete  the  job 
with  a  Congressional  resolution  and  a  flourish  of 
the  pen.  Too  many  eminent  gentlemen  in  all  na- 
tions have  something  to  gain  by  the  race  of  arma- 
ments.    But  it  is  a  first  necessary  step. 

Then,  even  before  we  have  a  league,  association 
or  effective  High  Court  of  Nations,  we  may  get  at 
some  of  the  economic  causes  for  war. 

The  "financial  imperialism"  which  brought  on  the 
Great  War  had  three  wholly  commercial  objects — 
trade,  raw  materials,  export  of  capital.  The  strug- 
gle for  trade — for  profitable  foreign  markets — is, 
in  the  opinion  of  many  economists,  the  least  danger- 
ous of  the  three.  For  while  it  is  a  cause  of  friction, 
it  has  also  a  pacific  tendency.  When  two  nations 
begin  to  trade  with  each  other,  there  follow  personal 
acquaintance  and  a  community  of  interest.  We 
saw  that  at  the  beginning  of  the  Great  War,  when 
many  Americans  in  the  exporting  business  sincerely 
took  sides  either  with  Germany  or  England  because 
they  had  with  Germans  or  Englishman  business  rela- 
tions and  personal  acquaintance.  The  most  danger- 
ous factor  in  national  trade  is  tariffs.  I  am  not 
preaching  for  or  against  tariffs.  But  they  can  be 
so  drawn  as  to  take  unfair  advantage,  to  work  in- 
justice against  some  given  nation.  The  tariff  is  no 
longer  purely  a  domestic  question.     We  must  draw 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        153 

our  schedules  no  longer  with  an  eye  solely  on  imme- 
diate national  prosperity;  we  must  consider  them 
also  in  the  light  of  good  and  just  international  re- 
lations. 

Some  kind  of  international  agreement  concerning 
the  distribution  of  raw  materials  seems  necessary  to 
permanent  peace.  If  any  great  nation  should  in 
this  year  corner  the  international  supply  of  flax,  for 
example,  the  great  linen  industry  of  Belgium  would 
be  ruined;  for  Belgium  raises  only  a  little  domestic 
flax.  Italy  has  most  expert  and  intelligent  work- 
men, together  with  certain  other  manufacturing  ad- 
vantages; she  has  no  coal  nor  iron  ore.  Shut  off 
coal  and  iron  from  Italy  and  the  Valley  of  the  Po 
knows  acute  distress.  No  longer  should  any  nation 
or  combinations  of  nations  be  allowed  to  monopo- 
lize any  imported  raw  material. 

Finally:  the  advantageous  export  of  capital  was 
perhaps  the  main  object  of  financial  imperialism  and 
so  one  of  the  main  causes  for  the  late  war.  In  the 
intense  struggle  at  home,  your  capital  would  yield 
you  only  three  or  four  or  five  per  cent.  Put  into  a 
new,  undeveloped  country,  it  might  yield  you — any- 
thing. Only  it  would  not  return  its  big  interest- 
rate  for  long  if  other  capitalists  in  other  nations 
themselves  saw  the  chance,  came  in,  and  competed. 
The  game  of  the  international  flotation  houses 
which  represented  national  surplus  capital  was  to 
keep  their  "sphere  of  influence"  exclusive.  This 
was  the  chief  commercial  object  of  the  huge  arma- 


154  THE  NEXT  WAR 

ments,  the  rattling  of  swords  when  diplomacy  ran 
into  a  deadlock.  Before  the  Great  War  that  proc- 
ess was  running  a  dangerous  course  in  China. 
Here,  you  were  in  a  British  "sphere  of  influence"; 
in  general  non-British  capital  was  not  wanted,  could 
not  get  a  foothold.  Here,  the  influence  was  Ger- 
man; here,  French.  And  the  nations  were  jockey- 
ing to  extend  their  sphere  further  and  further  into 
China — without  regard  of  course  for  the  feelings  of 
the  inhabitants. 

Some  internationalization  of  export  capital  seems 
necessary  to  permanent  peace.  This  may  come 
through  an  association  of  nations;  it  may  come  be- 
fore that  association  is  effective  through  action  of 
the  great  flotation  houses.  Most  banking  men 
want  peace;  war  is  too  disturbing,  armaments  are 
too  costly.  But  in  strategic  control  of  the  world's 
financial  interests  before  the  war  were  too  many 
ruthless  adventurers  allied  with  the  military  and 
financial  adventurers.  Banking  also  was  caught 
in  a  wheel.  There  are  the  signs  that  sober  sense 
is  coming  into  this  business.  The  "Chinese  con- 
sortium" is  an  association  of  the  capital  of  many 
nations  for  investment  in  China.  It  may  be  open 
to  criticism  on  some  grounds;  but  let  us  give  credit 
where  credit  is  earned.  Such  an  arrangement  tends 
to  do  away  with  "spheres  of  Influence,"  with  the 
seeming  necessity  for  keeping  up  armament  and  a 
state  of  passive  warfare  in  order  to  protect  export 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        155 

capital.     It  squares  with  the  international  finance 
of  the  future. 

Last  but  not  least,  we  Americans  have  it  in  our 
power  to  abolish  that  secret  diplomacy  which,  every- 
one agrees,  makes  toward  wars.  We  cannot  have 
much  secret  diplomacy  ourselves,  since  all  our  inter- 
national agreements  must  be  thrashed  out  and  rati- 
fied in  the  Senate,  and  so  published.  The  trend  of 
the  period,  fortunately,  is  against  the  gum-shoe 
method  of  arriving  at  national  understandings  which 
become  in  due  time  misunderstandings.  Really, 
monarchs  before  the  great  war  had  not  nearly  so 
much  irresponsible  power  as  diplomats;  and  the 
right  to  conceal  their  agreements  from  their  people 
was  their  best  tool.  That  is  changing.  Great 
Britain,  once  as  much  a  sinner  as  the  rest,  has  but 
lately  registered  and  published  with  the  League  of 
Nations  the  twenty-one  treaties  and  agreements 
which  she  has  made  since  the  war,  has  given  her 
national  word  of  honor  that  she  is  holding  nothing 
back.  Even  before  we  enter  some  kind  of  associa- 
tion of  nations,  we  have  probably  the  power  to  end 
much  of  the  secret  diplomacy.  We  need  merely 
announce  that  we  will  not  recognize  any  treaty  which 
has  not  been  published  to  the  world. 

Yet — returning  to  the  kernel  of  the  matter — we, 
the  citizens  of  the  world,  shall  not  find  that  the  or- 
ganization of  law  between  nations  is  enough  in  itself 


156  THE  NEXT  WAR 

to  keep  peace;  just  as  within  the  nations  of  the 
world  law  alone  is  not  enough  to  prevent  crime  and 
establish  order.  You  may  happen  to  see  this  morn- 
ing a  beautiful  automobile  which  you  would  like  to 
own,  standing  unlocked  and  unguarded.  Why  don't 
you  jump  in  and  drive  away?  First,  because  you 
fear  disagreeable  consequences  from  the  law.  The 
police  will  chase  you,  probably  catch  you,  eventually 
put  you  in  jail.  But  is  that  the  only  reason?  No; 
you  are  restrained  by  an  instinct  first  implanted  in 
your  little,  savage  bosom  at  your  mother's  knee,  and 
intensified  by  your  whole  education — the  feeling 
that  it  is  wrong  to  steal.  In  order  to  keep  society 
together,  we  need  both  these  forces. 

So  it  goes  with  this  question  of  order  and  morality 
among  nations.  We  need  the  law;  we  need  also 
personal  ethics — international  morality.  By  the 
forces  of  light  which  we  have — churches,  schools, 
all  associations  of  men  for  spiritual  and  intellectual 
ends — we  need  to  strengthen  the  belief  that  a  state, 
including  your  own,  can  do  wrong,  that  between 
nations  there  is  such  a  thing  as  live  and  let  live,  that 
humanity  is  greater  than  mere  race. 

This  does  not  mean  abolishing  the  sentiment  of 
patriotism.  There  are  two  conceptions  of  that 
noble  old  emotion.  One  ends  at  the  mental  condi- 
tion of  Germany  in  19 14 — the  state  for  the  state's 
sake,  your  hand  ever  on  your  sword  to  protect  her 
honor  and  her  interests,  though  every  person  in  the 
state  be  rendered  less  happy  by  the  process.     The 


PROPOSED  WAYS  TO  PEACE        157 

other  regards  the  nation  as  an  agency  for  the  great- 
est good  of  the  greatest  number.  He  who  follows 
this  conception  takes  his  pride  not  in  his  nation's 
hollow  victories  of  arms  but  in  her  achievements  of 
order,  common  prosperity,  art,  science,  industry. 
The  one  is  the  old-fashioned  patriotism,  grown  in 
the  twentieth  century  to  a  world-menace;  the  other 
is  the  patriotism  of  the  future. 

Again  let  me  make  a  human  comparison.  In  all 
times  poets  have  sung  of  the  nation  as  the  Mother, 
of  its  citizens  as  her  sons  and  daughters.  Now  you 
may  interpret  your  love  for  your  mother  in  two 
ways,  one  sane,  the  other  a  little  insane.  You  may 
work  peacefully  to  keep  her  happy  and  well-housed 
and  well-fed.  This,  I  suppose,  states  the  attitude 
of  most  of  us  toward  our  mothers.  But  of  course 
you  may  go  round  with  a  pistol  in  your  pocket,  al- 
ways ready  to  start  a  fight  with  anyone  who  may 
say  that  she  Is  not  the  best  of  mothers,  or  watching 
for  an  opportunity  to  hold  up  a  shop  and  steal  the 
fur  coat  which  she  happens  to  want.  So,  I  suppose, 
the  savage  expressed  his  love  for  his  mother  in  the 
days  before  the  law;  in  recent  ages  we  have  had 
less  and  less  patience  with  this  form  of  filial  de- 
votion. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  TEMPTER 

Now,  my  America,  I  will  take  you  to  an  exceed- 
ing high  mountain;  I  will  show  you  all  the  kingdoms 
of  the  world  and  the  glory  of  them. 

What  an  opportunity  we  have  in  this  year  1921  ! 
Here  we  sit  In  the  midst  of  our  Continent,  great  and 
rich  as  all  Western  Europe.  Almost  are  we  un- 
scathed by  the  war,  while  the  others  which  were 
Pov/ers  but  six  years  ago  struggle  now  with  an- 
archy and  bankruptcy.  The  power  of  Powers  has 
been  given  into  our  hands. 

The  British  navy  once  held  mastership  of  the 
seas.  We  can  now  take  mastership  ourselves. 
Ships  are  made  of  steel;  the  great  steel-producing 
nation  may  if  it  wishes  be  the  great  naval  nation.  And 
steel  is  made  of  coal  and  iron.  While  the  British 
coal  measures  ever  shrink,  we  have  only  begun  to 
tap  ours;  while  the  British  struggle  for  imported 
iron  ore,  we  mine  more  than  we  need.  And  so 
clever  are  we  at  mass-production  that  we  make  more 
steel  to  the  man  and  to  the  furnace  than  any  other 
people  of  the  world.  Great  Britain  kept  her  navy 
stronger  than  that  of  any  two  other  powers;  we, 

158 


THE  TEMPTER  159 

with  less  effort,  may  keep  ours  stronger  than  that 
of  all  the  other  powers. 

Think,  too,  of  our  military  potentiality  I  We 
may,  if  we  will,  summon  to  the  colors  more  soldiers 
than  France,  Germany  and  Belgium  put  together. 
And  what  soldiers!  Beside  our  stalwart  divisions, 
their  comrades  on  the  European  battlefields  looked 
scrawny.  We  have  learned  war,  now;  the  Ameri- 
can army  has  been  brought  up  to  date.  We  have 
at  this  instant  more  munitions,  lying  greased  and 
ready  in  storage,  than  any  other  nation  on  earth. 
We  have  more  manufacturing  power  for  new  mu- 
nitions than  any  other  two  nations.  Back  of 
it  all,  we  have  the  American  ingenuity  which  gave 
the  world  so  many  of  its  industrial  inventions  In  the 
nineteenth  century.  We,  of  all,  will  know  best 
how  to  keep  ahead  of  the  new  warfare.  Did  we 
not  Invent  Lewisite  gas?  Did  we  not  show  how 
aeroplane  engines,  hitherto  manufactured  painfully 
by  hand,  could  be  poured  out  by  machine  processes, 
like  Ford  cars? 

South  from  our  borders  to  the  isthmus  runs  a  suc- 
cession of  undeveloped  countries,  as  rich  and  nearly 
as  large  as  our  own  national  domain.  They  need 
capital;  we  are  exporting  capital  faster  and  faster. 
Here  lies  much  profit  for  us  all — if  we  can  keep  the 
field  exclusive.  Our  diplomacy.  If  backed  by  the 
unprecedented  military  power  we  have  at  command, 
can  keep  it  exclusive.  Then,  some  day  when  we 
hold  a  tight  financial  grip  on  Mexico,  Guatemala 


i6o  THE  NEXT  WAR 

and  the  rest,  there  may  follow — incidents.  We  may 
find  it  necessary  to  go  down  and  take  these  countries 
over — as  a  means  of  defending  Americans  and 
American  capital  abroad.  Why  not?  Is  not  our 
civilization  better  than  that  of  Mexico  and  Guate- 
mala? Will  not  the  inhabitants  be  higher  and  bet- 
ter if  we  take  over  their  responsibilities  and  make 
them  Americans? 

Canada  lies  to  our  North;  very  rich  in  resources, 
less  developed  than  we  are;  inhabited  by  people 
with  the  same  language  as  ours,  of  very  much  the 
same  habits  of  thought.  When  we  have  the  domi- 
nant navy,  perhaps  the  British  Empire  may  break 
up;  perhaps  Canada  may  wish  to  throw  in  her  lot 
with  us,  either  as  a  member  of  our  Confederation 
or  as  a  close  ally.  West  of  us  lies  the  Pacific;  with 
our  dominant  fleet,  we  may  make  it  an  American 
lake. 

What  national  greatness,  what  glory!  "Domin- 
ion over  palm  and  pine" — why,  we  shall  hold  do- 
minion over  Arctic  tundra  and  tropical  jungle.  No 
empire,  whether  it  be  Rome  of  the  second  century 
or  Spain  of  the  sixteenth  or  Great  Britain  of  the 
nineteenth,  ever  held  complete,  undisputed  mastery 
of  its  own  continent.  But  we  shall.  The  old  Spain 
of  the  Philips  called  the  Mediterranean  "Mare 
Nostrum" — our  sea — the  little  Mediterranean! 
Our  sea  will  be  the  Pacific,  mightiest  of  all  oceans. 
With  what  a  thrill  may  the  schoolboy  of  1950  sa- 


THE  TEMPTER  161 

lute  our  flag,  symbol  of  such  power  and  glory  as 
never  was  since  history  began! 

So  was  Germany  led  to  an  exceeding  high  moun- 
tain. Germany  listened  to  the  tempter  and  chose 
the  kingdoms  of  the  world.  And  Germany  in 
1921   .  .  . 

Ah,  but  the  tempter  never  lets  you  read  to  the 
end  of  the  chapter;  never  shows  you  the  whole 
picture.  Behind  these  gorgeous  visions  floating  in 
rosy  mist  lurk  death  .  .  .  poverty  .  .  .  starva- 
tion .  .  .  despair  ...  a  civilization  become  offal 
and  ashes.  He  does  not  show  you  these ;  he  knows 
that  he  is  at  war  with  the  purposes  of  eternity. 


THE  END 


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